Will this be the beginning of the death of YouTube?

"Sorry, something went wrong. We're working on it and we'll get it fixed as soon as we can."

That’s what Facebook had to tell you last night if you’d logged in. While people were thinking cyber attack, Facebook was thinking YouTube hack.

Now, videos will view for your attention with Facebook’s newly launched autoplay feature. When Twitter already had this feature inbuilt, Facebook must have felt to be left out in the social world. But, does it really make sense for social media to automatically play videos on your timeline, when you might not even know, what’s in store for you? And wasting bandwidth for unwanted video buffering?

In its initiation, people are annoyed and afraid of this auto-play feature on the social platform. This is what Google search (and we are not even talking about how Google executives feel about it) had to tell us. Type “Facebook auto-play feature” and you will find “How do I stop videos from playing automatically?” in the top auto-completes. Of course, it might become a matter of embarrassment when you get to watch something unwanted or annoying on your timeline, even when you do not really wish to. And how about those hacked porno clips that show up? We are sure Facebook will be working on the solution to this?

While for users, this might just be a matter of annoyance and extra data usage, for brands, it has landed them in a silly situation of “To be or not to be...”.

As of now, YouTube has been the central point of uploading videos for any brand, from where they can share it on other social platforms. Now, Facebook monetising and advancing its moves in terms of facilitating video advertising services, it seems to give a tough competition to YouTube views. The brands will now have to decide on where to spend the money.

Viral video phenomenon, which has been on a high in the recent days, is mostly dependent on the Facebook views. The more Facebook users watch the videos on YouTube, the more popular it becomes.

With Facebook prioritizing the videos uploaded on its own platforms versus the YouTube videos, it will certainly affect YouTube in a big way.

What do you have to say about it? Share with us in the comments below. And for those who wish to disable the feature here are the steps to do it:

1. From the top right of Facebook, click and select Settings

2. Click Videos in the left menu

3. Click the dropdown menu next to Auto-play Videos and select Off