Just days after rolling out the Stories feature to a larger creator base, YouTube is now rolling ‘Autoplay on home’ to its mobile app on Android and iOS devices. Starting today, YouTube will now start playing videos automatically by default in a user’s home tab.
This is YouTube’s take on Instagram’s scrollable interface which plays videos on mute when there is one. The Autoplay on home was previously a YouTube Premium feature and now comes to the mobile version of YouTube, allowing users a preview of the video that they’re about to watch without an audio track.
The preview video that will be presented to users through autoplay will not play a sound but will display captions related to that content. Considering captions are still nowhere near perfection, Youtube is giving content creators tools to add and edit the captions as well as Crowd-sourced community captions, automatic captions and creator uploaded captions.
The feature when being rolled out will be toggled on by default but can be switched off by heading over to Settings > Autoplay and tapping the toggle next to “Autoplay on Home”. Users can also choose from an ‘Only autoplay on WiFi’ to minimise additional data usage when browsing through content in cellular data.
Autoplay on home is basically Google’s way of increasing view counts of videos on its platforms. For content creators, this feature will allow room for better monetisation as it moves from attractive thumbnails to short video clips from the original video to allow higher engagement.
‘Autoplay on home’ is rolling out to the original YouTube app on iOS and Android devices.