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Facebook's Auto-Play Videos Chew Up Expensive Data Plans

Posted by timothy on from the rude-to-users-is-the-short-term-business-mindset dept.

Another good reason to be annoyed by autoplaying videos online: it eats up dataplan allowances, making for some rude surprises. I'm always nervous about data allowances, and sites should be cautious about what they shove at you; turning off the autoplay feature isn't hard (and it's explained in the second article linked above), but I sure wish it was the default setting, or at least caught and handled by a browser extension. (Perhaps this is a job for Social Fixer's next iteration.) Is Facebook the worst offender on this front?

3 of 108 comments (clear)

  1. autoplay sucks anyway by ihtoit · · Score: 5, Interesting

    it kicks the snot out of the loadtime for the rest of the page as it seems to want to buffer the entire fucking stream first, I tend to go find myself another source. If slashdot ever decided to pull this shit, I'd go find a privately hosted nerd site. Or build my own. With blackjack and hookers.

    --
    Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
  2. IMO this is a good thing by mysidia · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Don't get me wrong.... I hate video autoplay.

    But I feel that things like this will ultimately result on pressure on carriers to correct the real problem: The dataplan allowances are way too low, AND 1 Gigabyte of data is priced way too high.

    So by having autoplay..... ordinary folks will be using more data, BUT they're not going to want to pay a lot, so there is going to be pressure on carriers to increase data allowances

  3. Re:Autoplay is EVIL by Rei · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Why is it any more evil than animated GIFs? Both play automatically, neither happen with sound, and compression on x264 is *way* better than with animated gifs.

    I was initially opposed to autoplay on FB, but after thinking about it, I changed my mind. We already see tons of animated stuff on web pages, and the videos from people who show up on my page about are usually things I'd find interesting (if the user posting them didn't usually post interesting things, I'd have stopped following them). There's no unexpected sounds to bug me, and the quality to size ratio versus animated gifs is, what, two orders of magnitude better?

    --
    "... even though he sins so much that people cast him out of demons."