Facebook introduces new Vertical Video Feature, TV App Coming Soon

Facebook Vertical Videos Picture-in-Picture

Facebook is heavily investing on the video sharing side of its social network. None other intention but it’s pretty obvious that the most popular social network today is having plans to compete YouTube.

No wonder YouTube is the largest video sharing portal for serious creators but on the other hand Facebook has a larger viewership. No mater what kind of videos they are, they have wider reach as the the platform is mostly in use by every other individual.

The blue themed social platform that — Facebook is has now introduced new ways of watching videos on your iOS and/or Android devices. In addition, the new Facebook TV app – specially designed for smart TVs will soon be available.

Video Sound in News Feed

Facebook has been playing videos automatically in your news feed — silently though. You had to tap on a video to hear sound. While I personally prefer this way to be more appropriate, facebook has heard more positive feedback about sound also “playing automatically”. Hence they are now making the feature available widely.

With the new feature, sound activates automatically along with the video that fades in and out as you scroll through videos in news feed. So if you are like me, you will prefer to keep your phone in silent mode before scrolling through the new feed. But if you want to watch a video with sound, now you need to unmute the phone again — oh! wonder who gave positive feedback for this feature, sorry about that.

Well, luckily in Settings we can still disable this feature as labeled with “Videos in News Feed Start With Sound”. Good for me at least.

Vertical Videos

After having been through limited users trial and feedback process, Facebook is rolling out the full screen feature for vertical videos. The new larger preview format is now available to everyone watching videos on iOS and Android.

Picture-in-Picture

An interesting and most usable feature is of course this one, that you can now keep video playback right on the screen in a corner while navigating through the app. You can drag the video picture-in-picture view around the corners on the screen. Thanks to Android platform that you can keep watching the video if you exit from the Facebook app. iOS doesn’t support the latter.

Facebook TV App

The social network has also announced a new Facebook video app for smart TVs, which will roll out soon to app stores for Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV and Samsung Smart TV, with more platforms to come.

“Our video app for TV is a new way to enjoy Facebook videos on a bigger screen. […] With the app, you can watch videos shared by friends or Pages you follow, top live videos from around the world, and recommended videos based on your interests. You can also catch up on videos you’ve saved to watch later, as well as revisit videos you’ve watched, shared or uploaded. We look forward to seeing how people use the app to enjoy Facebook videos in a new way.”