Instagram says it now auto plays video sounds once you have enabled it on a clip. What this means is that in order to strike a balance between videos playing auto playing annoyingly and you having to play sound on each clip if you have to watch say more than one video of your friend in a row, Instagram will honour your request per that clip by your friend.
But this will reset once you close the app so that the annoying auto play videos are left out the next time you open the app.
When you open Instagram, videos will still autoplay with the sound off. But if you tap to turn one video’s sound on, indicated with a speaker icon in the bottom left, all other videos will autoplay with sound too for the rest of your Instagram session. You can still tap to toggle a video and all subsequent ones back to silent. And when you close the app, the autoplay audio resets to off for next time you use Instagram.
This simply means that from now on, you’ll be able to play back-to-back videos that you want to watch while avoiding the embarrassment of videos suddenly disturbing others around you.
This update might make it more difficult for advertisers who want people to hear what they are saying in adverts and not just the video. Instagram allows video ads but by blocking out sound, many users may not eventually get the message in the ad which should ordinarily make advertisers unhappy.
But being an option you can use once per Instagram session, there’s the chance that you may eventually hear a jingle in the feed at some point which would make you scroll to the ad. This should make advertisers happy eventually.
Like I said at the beginning, the idea seems to be about more about striking a balance between unwanted sounds and having to click on sound each time you have watch several clips of interest.
