Google, the company responsible for the most famous search engine on the internet and owner of YouTube has decided to add a new feature to its video streaming web page. This new app is called “Autoplay on Home” and it consists on automatically playing YouTube videos when you open the page. This new feature has been available for over half a year for YouTube premium members on Android. This feature works when you open the YouTube application and see your video feed. What it will do is that the video will begin, but with no sound. The main idea for this feature is for the person browsing YouTube to be able to preview videos before choosing if it’s worth to watch it or not. Google has allowed this option to be disabled or to be used only when connected to Wi-Fi.
According to the article on this new option, Google believes that Autoplay on Home is a “better way to experience and browseYouTube on the move”. Having used this new feature, myself, I have to agree that it is quite useful. Something that I always though had been missing from the YouTube platform was a way to preview videos. This is because many times because I have clicked on videos which I thought were legit and they are not what I thought they were. There was a famous prank in the internet back in the mid 2000s called “Rick Rolling”. For example, it consisted on naming a video “alien caught on tape”, and when you clicked on it, it was just a video of a singer called Rick Astley. This preview feature can obviously help get rid of these types of videos and as I mentioned before, choose whether a video is worth watching.
However, this is not truly an innovation, as there are many webpages that I have seen that have previews of their videos. I believeYouTube entered the game a little late, but since it’s the biggest page for video browsing, it will do no harm. I do believe it is a great business idea. Apart from engaging your customers, it can also help by “inflating view counts”,making a video apparently more popular. This is an opportunity to make more money, because higher view counts on videos essentially would mean more advertisers paying YouTube to put their ads in videos around the world. I do believe that it will prove to be a good money move.
What might be up for debate is whether people will use this new option. The article for this feature says that “Google’s main goal with this feature is to make videos more digestible in a mobile context”. This is why this option comes automatically with the new application update. Whether people disable the feature or not is up to personal taste. As I have mentioned,I do enjoy this option to preview videos because I use YouTube in my cellphone a lot. Other might not like it, so I’m not sure if it will prove as successful with everyone. However, I do believe the majority will be pleased with it.
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