Facebook’s floating video player lets you scroll through News Feed while watching videos

Facebook has long been telling us that its video plans are not to be scoffed at. In the latest bid to prove this point, the company is reportedly introducing floating videos.

According to The NextWeb, the new video player enables videos to play while floating above the News Feed without disturbing the user’s reading experience. This is already happens on the YouTube app and Facebook introducing it shows the company’s intent about hosting video content.

Over the past few months Facebook has been introducing changes to its video hosting capabilities and partnering up with other entities to push for video content.

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Early this year, the company had claimed that in just one year, the number of video posts per person had increased 75% globally and 94% in the US. The number of videos in people’s Facebook feeds grew by 3.6 times over the past year.

For now, floating videos appear to be available only to a handful of users and as yet there has been no official word from Facebook. The floating video has a new video detach button visible next to the playback controls on the web. The feature appears not to be available on the Facebook apps on smartphones and tablets. It should however only be a matter of time before it is.

The size of the video is the same size as YouTube’s floating videos and it is not clear if it can be resized or not.

As on YouTube, the video can be moved around as long as one remains in the News Feed on the same page. The next step for Facebook would be to have the video play and stop even when one moves away from the News Feed. YouTube’s app already has this with users able to search for other videos while watching the floating video.

A recent survey by Ampere Analysis suggested that Facebook video views are growing so fast that they could catch up with YouTube’s in a few years.

Facebook had earlier this year claimed that more than 50% of people who come back to Facebook every day in the US watch at least one video daily and 76% of people in the US who use Facebook say they tend to discover the videos they watch on Facebook.

Facebook has not said anything about the floating video player.