Twitter started rolling out a video auto play feature yesterday on videos, Vines and GIFs in users' timelines.
The feature plays the video on mute as the user scrolls through their timeline. "Once you tap the video, sound will turn on and the video will continue to play in an expanded view," Baljeet Singh, video product director, says in a blog post.
Users will have the option to revert to click-to-play in their settings, or opt to have videos only auto play when connected to WiFi. Roll out of the feature started yesterday for iOS and desktops, with an Android version coming soon.
The new auto play feature also changes how companies will be charged for a view of a promoted video. "Starting today, we'll only consider a view on Twitter chargeable when a video is 100% in-view on the user's device, and has been watched for at least three seconds," says David Regan, Twitter senior product manager, in a separate blog post.
"Further, we'll soon be working with multiple third-party verification vendors to give advertisers confidence that their promoted video content is reaching the right viewer with the right message," notes Regan. Twitter is in talks with measurement and analytics firms Nielsen and Moat to verify metrics to ensure transparency.
Regan says insights gained during video auto play tests showed users had better recall with auto play, and complete viewing of promoted videos was seven times more likely with the new feature.
Other social networks, Facebook and Instagram, have had an auto play feature available for native videos for some time already. Last month, Facebook announced it would start letting users post animated GIFs to the platform within the next few weeks. It is unclear if the feature has been rolled out in South Africa yet.
According to a forecast by PricewaterhouseCoopers on advertising and consumer spending, South African entertainment and media outlook (2013 - 2017), video advertising in SA is still in a "nascent form". The segment is expected to grow annually at 59.9%; however, this massive growth could be attributed to its very low starting point, as video advertising was "non-existent in SA before 2012". Video advertising is only expected to reach R8 million in income in 2017, according to the forecast.
"A key reason for video advertising's limited growth is the relatively low fixed broadband penetration rate in SA, which is forecast to remain low," states the report. "While mobile Internet penetration has increased in recent years, the majority of mobile devices have not had the capacity to stream high-quality video, which is dissuading advertisers from investing in the new format."
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