Facebook has announced a feature in its next update that looks set to directly attack YouTube. The update features a YouTube style counter for public videos.
Facebook, on its blog, has boasted having over 1 billion videos viewed each day with more than 65 per cent viewed on mobiles. While that does sound like a threatening number it's probably helped by the autoplay feature that the app now has as standard. Also the recent Ice Bucket Challenge videos probably helped to boost those numbers.
The new "views" figures that will be displayed on videos will be shown on public videos from people and Pages. This should allow people to discover new and popular videos, all from within the Facebook app.
Facebook has also announced another video feature that's currently in testing. It will play related video content after the video being watched is finished. While this could be useful for a never-ending stream of video fun, we'd imagine it's prime advertising and marketing for Facebook and that will likely drive a lot of those video choices.
Video publishers can now also add a call to action like a link to a website once the video ends – another YouTube-like feature that should encourage more professionally published videos.
The latest Facebook app update will begin rolling out this week.