In recent years, web browsers have been defining stricter policies regarding video autoplay. Historically, autoplay was allowed on Desktop browsers and not allowed on mobile ones (mostly to avoid unwanted data consumption on a mobile network connection) but this is not as simple as that anymore.
Stricter autoplay policies allow for improved user experience, reduce incentives to install ad blockers, and reduce data consumption on expensive and/or constrained networks.
The player doesn't have complete control on autoplay, the browser decides if the video shall be auto-played or not. Please note, in most environments, after a video is played, the next one can automatically start without any need of further user interaction.
The behaviour of our default autoplay Player parameter is as follows, when a video is loaded, the player tries to automatically attempt to start the playback of the video with sound. If this isn't possible due to browser prevention, there is a fallback and the player attempts again to play the video again but with the sound set to mute.
Chrome
Chrome updated their Autoplay Policies in April 2018. Usually, If the video is muted, then autoplay will be allowed.
The video is also allowed to autoplay with sound, depending on the users' Media Engagement Index(MEI), previous interaction with the domain or the user has added the website to their home screen on their mobile.
The MEI is a measurement of the individual's media consumption per origin. Therefore, your MEI score will be highest on sites where you regularly play media. You can check your media engagement index score here: chrome://media-engagement/.
If you manually embedded video with a standard iframe embed before January 23, 2018, please make the update below to ensure that your player is properly integrated with the new browser-driven autoplay behaviour on Google Chrome. The allow="autoplay" parameter is required within the iframe.
Please see here for more info regarding the allow="autoplay" parameter.
More about Chrome's Policies here.
Safari
Starting from Safari 11, users are able to switch between different Autoplay configurations. The user has control over which sites are allowed to auto-play by default, by configuring the "Websites" preference window. Preferences> Websites> Auto-Play.
Safari blocks nearly all auto-playing media with sound by default. Except for the larger sites like YouTube & Facebook. In order to allow auto-playing on other sites, it's possible to simply change the auto-play configuration, head to that site and click 'Settings for This Website', in the Safari tab from the menu bar.
In the pop-up window, you can toggle between different auto-play parameters [Allow all Auto-Play], [Stop Media with Sound] or [Never Autoplay].
This allows videos on this domain play, but not for other websites using videos from this domain. ie, if you had Dailymotion.com configured to autoplay, it doesn't allow for Dailymotion videos on your site autoplay, It is domain-specific.
More about Safari's Policies here.
Firefox
Firefox prevents all video with sound from autoplay by default. If you want to change these settings, Firefox offers a number of easy methods to quickly reconfigure the autoplay parameters.
- Disable it, in the advanced settings of the web browser. Preferences>Privacy & Security.
- Toggle the site permissions, by clicking the info button, in the address bar.
- Navigate to the advanced settings using about:config in the search bar, change the option to media.autoplay.enabled to [true] or [false].
More about Firefox's policies here.