Facebook Auto-Play Videos Are a Data Suck

Facebook first floated the idea of auto-play videos in the news feed late last year. Initially, the thought was that video ads were on the way, and they’d start automatically to catch the attention of those users scanning their feeds. Now that auto-start has been applied to videos on Facebook mobile, they’re using data at an obscene rate.

According to Dan Deeth, contributor to Sandvine’s Internet Phenomenon blog, this represents a marked increase in data consumption by Facebook on both mobile and fixed networks.

“In the past year, Facebook traffic (depending on the day) increased by 60 percent on the mobile network, and by over 200 percent on the fixed network, driven (we believe) mainly by the addition of auto-play videos to the Facebook feed.”

Deeth