Jack Marshall, writing for The Wall Street Journal:
Apple Inc. and Google made tweaks to their popular mobile web browsers recently to enable video content to play automatically in web pages, provided audio is muted.
The changes could result in a boost in mobile video consumption for online publishers if they allow their videos to play automatically, and it could unlock new revenue opportunities as a result.
For marketers, the tweaks will enable them to automatically play video content when potential customers visit their websites.
Autoplay means you consume your data plan simply by visiting a site. Some sites hide the video, making it invisible, and others place the video at the bottom of an article, ensuring you’ll need to scroll through the entire article to get to that elusive pause button.
It’s unclear how consumers will react to having videos play automatically on mobile webpages. Some industry observers suggest Facebook’s introduction of autoplay video in its News Feeds has, perhaps, helped people acclimatize to the idea.
But, in addition to potentially being distracting to some web users, autoplay videos could also increase the amount of data people consume through their wireless plans, potentially resulting in extra data charges.
“If you’re visiting a lot of sites with autoplay video then the bandwidth bill will be coming after that,” Mr. Wijering said.
Terrible.
F_ckers!
They’re just trying to make me buy an ad blocker
” elements will only begin playing when visible on-screen such as when they are scrolled into the viewport, made visible through CSS, and inserted into the DOM.
” elements will pause if they become non-visible, such as by being scrolled out of the viewport.”
https://webkit.org/blog/6784/new-video-policies-for-ios/
I couldn’t quite make out if the videos stop playing but continue to download/cache in the background even when not in the viewport? (I will check later when I’m not at work and can do more than skim, though.)
Count me among those welcoming autoplaying videos. I hate being directed to a .gifv link and having to tap to play.
I sent this to feedback@apple.com
You should too:
“”I have discovered that mobile Safari now autoplays video..
I want to say that this is a terrible implementation and an invasion of my privacy. Perhaps I will send you my cellular bill since you want to hijack my data for thios inane purpose.
Please change this behavior, or I will consider joining a class action lawsuit.
“It’s unclear how consumers will react to having videos play automatically on mobile webpages.” No – I think it’s pretty clear how we’ll react. NOT WELL….
Why would sites “hide the video, making it invisible, and others place the video at the bottom of an article” if audio is disabled? Why would you even know to “scroll through the entire article to get to that elusive pause button” if you can’t hear anything?
well that’s one.
class action lawsuit? dick move.
Two (maybe three) reasons, none good.
If they use pre, post or mid roll ads in the video, they get ad revenue based on plays. If nobody has to click a video, it plays for 100% of the visitors rather than the 3% who click Play. Results in a lot more ad revenue. It’s basically fraud when they hide the video or put it down at the bottom, especially when it autoloads video after video.
If it’s their own video content without video ads, they could be trying to inflate the play count so they can increase their ad rate for the surrounding banner ads.
There also might be an algorithm play, where there’s an increased likelihood of coming up on Youtube searches if the video is embedded from Youtube and played a lot.
I’m trying to imagine why Apple would do this, since there’s no advertising value from their point of view and it’s such a customer hostile position. The only things I can come up with a far flung conspiracy theories.
1) They’re trying to drive people to ad blockers even more.
2) They’re trying to drive people to apps even more.
3) They’re trying to drive people away from web browsers and to things like Apple News.
4)They’re trying to incentivize the migration toward pay walls.
5) They’re being forced to do this by some professional collective of publishers, advertisers, or merchants who threatened to block Safari users from their sites.
I’d rather not shut every site’s ad revenue down with an ad blocker, but autoplay is intolerable.
Good point, I wasn’t thinking about preroll ads etc. or play counts.
Absolutely. Why do I want video I don’t want to watch to play???
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Another day, another step closer to generic.
When you are browsing the website of a music artist or radio show, they can’t autoplay 3 megabytes of CONTENT for you, but every site on the Web can push invisible 30 megabyte ADS at you? Makes total sense if you are a corporate robot, I guess.
Today I saw somebody refer to “the iPhone 7 series” and I flashed back to “Windows Phone 7 Series.” Wow, how ignorant we Apple fans were back then, trashing Windows 7 for its corporate feel and ugly interface and innumerable unfixed bugs and complete lack of any joy and life and fun and culture, with no idea that inside Apple they were starting their photocopiers.
“Playing” is not the issue. The issue is “caching.”
Dick comment.
I hope the reporter who wrote that knows they are a corporate shill.
Because playing the video increments the play count, and the advertiser pays the publisher based on the number of plays.
Just the other day I saw a study that said 90% of the Adobe Flash content that is still on the Internet is totally invisible. It is just running in your browser either to fool an advertiser into paying for false ad impressions or steal your data.
6) Apple is a committee-driven company now, and committees make compromises rather than take stands for what is right.
I will gladly let you pay my mobile bill every month if you think it’s a dick move.
3 seconds is considered playback. Ads are out of hand. And algorithm ads are inane.
Ever buy something and then be presented with ads telling you to buy the same thing? This is progress?