Twitter Starts Autoplaying Videos on iOS and Web

After last week's announcement of removing the 140 character limit in Direct Messages, Twitter on Tuesday announced that it would be bringing the video autoplay feature to the micro-blogging network.

Twitter adds that the feature would work with native videos, Vines and animated gif images. This is supposed to give a "seamless video experience" to users and save an additional click for users to play videos. Also, the feature would work like seen with Instagram. While the video will start playing automatically, tapping on it again would play the video's sound. When the device is flipped into landscape mode, the video would automatically switch to full screen.

The company blog post however also mentions that users would still have the ability to switch back to click-to-play setup by going in the settings. An option to play videos automatically only when on Wi-Fi connectivity is also available. "If you're somewhere with high data rates or you have low bandwidth on your device, we'll opt you out of autoplay to avoid unexpected charges or slow performance; so you'll continue to see videos as click-to-play," adds the post.

The video autoplay feature has started rolling out for users on Twitter for iOS and for the Web interface. The feature would also reach Android devices "soon."

Twitter's announcement of video autoplay feature comes months after Facebook's introduction of the same in December last year. However, the latter's feature would only play eligible video mobile app-install ads in News Feed.

The micro-blogging network earlier this month introduced a feature to export and import block lists, using which Twitter users can curate their own list of blocked users on the micro-blogging network and share it with others. This is said to help make Twitter spam-free and "safer".