Vine’s new ‘Watch’ button takes away the loops

In a move that makes it a lot less loopy but likely no less lovable, Vine has rolled out a new “Watch” button for its iOS and Android apps that lets you sit back and view a channel’s videos as an endless stream.

With some users preferring to work their way through a channel or view an account’s entire collection of videos from start to finish, the video-sharing app’s new hands-free feature offers a more convenient, as well as conventional, viewing experience.

If you combine Watch with the recently introduced feature that lets you order videos in a user’s channel from newest to oldest, oldest to newest, or by popularity (accessible with a tap on “posts”), you’re in for a totally new kind of viewing experience using the Twitter-owned app.

It’ll certainly give your brain a break if you’re the kind of Vine user who gets sucked in to watching a single video over and over till your head feels as if it’s going to detach from your body and bounce off the walls like a pinball in a pinball machine. Although isn’t that the charm of Vine?

Anyway, if during your Watch session you happen upon a Vine that you desperately want to see loop over and over, simply press and hold your finger on the video and keep it there till you can take it no more.

The new feature is likely to be a welcome addition for Vine viewers, offering as it does an easier way to watch videos instead of scrolling through one by one. However, with each video playing only once before moving on (unless you press and hold), it may mean fewer views for individual videos. But then again, visitors could end up watching a greater number of videos by a single user if the flow of content is engaging enough to keep them glued to the screen.

An update with Vine’s new feature is available now on the App Store and Google Play.