It used to be that watching a video on Twitter required several taps. So when something was unfolding in real time, be it rugby finals game, your favorite TV show or breaking news that extra effort meant you could miss something that you care about. Over the past year Twitter has made several changes to improve how you share, discover and watch videos, such as reducing the number of taps it takes to play a video, introducing a native mobile camera and bringing videos and Vines front and center in your timeline.
Today, it’s become even easier to enjoy video on Twitter. Now native videos, Vines and GIFs will begin to play back automatically. So you can keep up with the action without missing a Tweet and get a better sense of what’s been shared instantly. Once you tap the video, sound will turn on and the video will continue to play in an expanded view. If you turn the video to landscape mode, the sound will automatically turn on and the video will expand to fill the screen.
Remember, you have ultimate control through your settings. You can choose to revert to the previous click-to-play experience all the time or simply have videos auto play only when you’re connected to Wi-Fi. If you’re somewhere with high data rates or you have low bandwidth on your device, we’ll opt you out of auto play to avoid unexpected charges or slow performance; so you’ll continue to see videos as click-to-play. Check out Twitter’s Help Center for more details on how to change your settings.
The new feature has started rolling out to everyone on Twitter for iOS and twitter.com; the Android version is coming soon.
