On mobile devices, all videos that begin playing as they appear on the screen will have been downloaded in advance when the device was connected to WiFi — meaning this content will not consume data plans, even if you’re not connected to WiFi at the time of playback
I wonder if this is how the functionality works in Instagram. I was pretty disappointed last week when a video auto-played while I was using my data (200mb per month plan).
If not, then it'd be nice if they could try to stay consistent across platforms.
Wow just wow, so adds are silently infecting your device only to be produced at the right( read: worst ) moment.
Which can royally screw people who are tethering via Wifi to a mobile device or mobile hotspot.
Yeah, but those are a pretty small minority. A lot of apps have the courtesy check of "don't download songs (photos/videos, whatever) until you're on WiFI". At some point an app has to assume it's safe to download assets, and when you're on WiFi is a pretty safe assumption.
Android, anyways, has a way to mark a WiFi AP as mobile so apps can avoid this.
Off topic, but this idea that bandwidth has to be carefully thought about and rationed, and resulting avoidance of innovation that uses bandwidth - not that ads are that innovative, but there are many similar situations - is why unlimited bandwidth really has significant benefits, even if the argument that metered bandwidth encourages providers to increase capacity is probably sound.
There are lots of places in the world where bandwidth is rationed for very real reasons, e.g due to oversubscribed cell towers.