I hate to be "that guy", but can you give a use case for why you would want to autoplay a video? Most of the time autoplay videos are just annoying, but I'm interested to see if there would be a good use case that I haven't thought of.
@Clint We use autoplay videos for controlled ad testing scenarios. By using autoplay in conjunction with JavaScript, we are able to control how and when users watch videos during our study(obviously they are primed on the previous pages). Removing control can be helpful for creating consistent testing environments. That being said, we run our videos through a separate integration, so I can't speak to the original question. My guess is they are being embedded as html5 vidoes. If thats true, adding an autoplay attribute should do the trick.
https://www.w3schools.com/tags/att_video_autoplay.asp
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@AnthonyR said:
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@Clint We use autoplay videos for controlled ad testing scenarios. By using autoplay in conjunction with JavaScript, we are able to control how and when users watch videos during our study(obviously they are primed on the previous pages). Removing control can be helpful for creating consistent testing environments. That being said, we run our videos through a separate integration, so I can't speak to the original question. My guess is they are being embedded as html5 vidoes. If thats true, adding an autoplay attribute should do the trick.
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> https://www.w3schools.com/tags/att_video_autoplay.asp
Very nice Mr. Anthony. I dig it.
Thanks for the replies guys. I will give that link a try. Basically what
@AnthonyR said. I need to find out how long respondents watch an ad. With autoplay I can make sure the timer starts as soon as the ad starts. It's the only way I can think of to accurately measure ad viewing time. And of course respondents would be primed beforehand. The only thing out of my control would be whether or not respondents paused and resumed the video (since I'm distributing the survey online). Mouse tracking and clicking behaviour would come in handy for that purpose, but that requires too much effort for my needs.
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@JLW said:
> Thanks for the replies guys. I will give that link a try. Basically what
@AnthonyR said. I need to find out how long respondents watch an ad. With autoplay I can make sure the timer starts as soon as the ad starts. It's the only way I can think of to accurately measure ad viewing time. And of course respondents would be primed beforehand. The only thing out of my control would be whether or not respondents paused and resumed the video (since I'm distributing the survey online). Mouse tracking and clicking behaviour would come in handy for that purpose, but that requires too much effort for my needs.
It is also worth noting that mobile devices do not respect autoplay. Most mobile operating systems actively block autoplay videos on webpages to avoid high data utilization without user consent.
Good to know thanks. In that case it won't make much sense to implement autoplay since most respondents will take the survey from their mobile device.
@JLW There are ways to track when the play button is pressed using JavaScript to help with timing.
@AnthonyR Do you know a good a method of doing so? I don't really know coding.
I would just also add that the main browsers are disabling the autoplay functionality. Safari did this a few months ago and Chrome either just did or is about to with their new update. So moving forward autoplay isn't going to be an option in any of the mainstream browsers unless the users toggle the functionality themselves. As a default, autoplay will be disabled.
How can we remove progress bar from a video
