YouTubes mobile apps will now autoplay videos on the Home tab by default
Autoplay on Home has proven popular with YouTube Premium users, so now its coming to the free apps as well
- By
- on December 4, 2018 3:48 am
YouTube has announced its trickling down a feature from its YouTube Premium apps, though its not the background playback that everyone really wants. Rolling out now, Autoplay on Home is a new default for YouTubes Android and iOS apps that will automatically start playing videos you see on your Home tab. Google will allow the option to disable it, or only keep it on when connected to Wi-Fi, but the company appears convinced that Autoplay on Home is a better way to experience and browse YouTube on the move.
Autoplay on Home will certainly help in one respect: inflating view counts. Googles main goal with this feature is to make videos more digestible in a mobile context, so the company is serving them up as frictionlessly as possible and in a format that doesnt require sound [muted, with captions on]. For creators, this means a greater chance to monetize their stuff should Googles algorithms determine its attractive enough to propagate to peoples YouTube Home feeds and for YouTube it means ever higher engagement metrics.
In a video explaining the change, YouTube product manager David Sharon dives a little deeper into the Autoplay on Home implications. Google has worked to reduce the mobile data consumption of autoplayed videos, and its also offering three different types of captions: automatic, creator-uploaded, and crowdsourced. Additionally, with the company conscious of how much time creators spend on crafting the perfect thumbnail for every video, the autoplay previews will only start playing after pausing briefly to show off the thumbnail.
While YouTube Premium users have apparently welcomed the Autoplay on Home implementation theyve had for the past six months, its not obvious that everyone else will greet the change as warmly. Defaults matter a great deal in the world of software, and its hard to get away from the sense that YouTube will become a visually noisier and more distracting place once this change kicks in. How that aligns with Googles claimed effort to improve the digital wellbeing of its users is not immediately clear.
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Comments
Yes! Finally!
By Skeith on 12.04.18 4:05am
I only want to play the video I would like to see, so :
Disable right away!!
Ohww oops I dont use Youtube but Youtube Vanced
By TaranQ on 12.04.18 4:07am
Youtube is the new Facebook
By RAYMON PXB on 12.04.18 6:49am
Autoplay is the bane of my existence.
By MysteryMii on 12.04.18 7:30am
Holy shit I hate autoplay
By Seigmoraig on 12.04.18 8:52am
I hate these kinds of decisions because it just lays bare how these companies see us, like the fat humanoids in Wall-E, just sat there as empty vessels to consume whatever content they want to feed us. Id like to think the average person would generally want to pick what they want to watch and not just sit there vacantly hoovering up everything served to them.
Then again I never really like automatic playlists in Spotify or the shuffle feature in general. I like to choose minute by minute what Im listening to as well.
By DavidDesu13 on 12.04.18 9:41am
Cool
By Christopher Kendalls on 12.04.18 10:28am
Finally.
Now lets add an indicator of the like/dislike ratio onto video cards, to at least combat clickbait.
By Pygasm on 12.04.18 10:45am
Google still not caring about anyones battery life I see _ -
By MaDBoOmAh on 12.04.18 12:26pm
Great so when I pull up YouTube to show my boss some work related video, we are going to get bombarded with what ever crap YouTube decide to put on the front page auto-playing
By big-ted on 12.04.18 3:53pm
.
You can turn it off. No need for the hysterics.
By VisionaryShaolin on 12.10.18 7:49am
Rather than automatically opt me in, how about having a pop up the first time a new feature like this is implemented and letting me make that decision? That way I dont have to dig through whatever monstrosity of a settings management Google has implemented, in order to get the setting Id prefer.
By cometguy on 12.04.18 3:57pm
I turned it off immediately when they first implemented it. Forgot that awful addition was there, and wasnt aware that it was a "premium" feature.
By Omen_20 on 12.05.18 2:09pm