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Facebook wants users to finish what they’ve started — at least when it comes to watching videos.
The company is testing a new feature that prompts users to “continue watching” videos that they’ve seen in News Feed, but never finished. The feature is a test, according to a company spokesperson, and appears at the top of some users’ News Feeds, but only on Facebook’s web version.
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The obvious point of this is to get people watching more video. But it may also play into Facebook’s new lean-back video strategy, where it’s asking publishers for longer videos and hoping that users may even watch them on traditional television sets.
When Facebook launched a few connected-TV apps last month, VP of Partnerships Dan Rose suggested that people might turn to Apple TV and Amazon Fire TV when they didn’t have time to finish videos during the day.
“A lot of people, when they’re watching video on News Feed during the day, will save it for later because they don’t have time to watch that three-minute video,” Rose explained at Recode’s Code Media conference. “Now it’s easy to go on your TV if you want to do that at night."
A spokesperson added that this test in in its “early stages,” and as with all Facebook tests, it’s possible that the “continue watching” feature may never make it to all users.
It’s worth noting that Facebook has upset advertisers for over-counting video views in some cases. The company said the miscounting had partly come from a bug and that it was working to fix the problem.
Despite Facebook’s massive ad business, it’s still in the early stages of tapping into the bigger brand-advertising campaigns that land on TV. The social network has more aggressively pushed into video to wrest away that business, and recently started testing mid-roll ads in videos. So the longer you watch, the more ads you might see.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
