TL;DR with the release of desktop Chrome 66 and Safari 11 autoplay with sound is becoming widely unavailable or restricted in the web industry. If you plan on using autoplay, we recommend using a unified muted autoplay approach which works well on mobile and desktop. Muted autoplay in Radiant Media Player can be achieved by using autoplay and muted settings set to true.
Autoplay (or autostart) allows media content or pre-roll advertisement to start without the need for a user interaction - most of the time autoplay happens when page loads.
Radiant Media Player provides support for autoplay of media content or pre-roll advertisement with live, DVR & on-demand streaming. Autoplay works with all supported streaming protocols (HLS, DASH or progressive download). Autoplay of outstream video ads is also supported. On modern mobile devices autoplay with audio is not available but muted autoplay can be used.
Years of autoplay with sound misusage in the industry have caused viewers to grow weary of autoplaying video with sound. Major actors in the industry have picked up on this trend and new autoplay policies are being rolled out into major browsers and devices. Those new policies tend to limit autoplay capabilities while pointing at muted autoplay as the new standard for autoplaying video content, be it for mobile or desktop devices. With Radiant Media Player muted autoplay can be achieved by using autoplay and muted player settings set to true. You can check our compatibility table for more information on the subject.
Radiant Media Player is equipped with various detection and fallback mechanisms to insure your content remains watch-able whether you are using autoplay or not. When autoplay is requested but blocked by the browser (or another interfering mechanism), the player will gracefully provide a play icon to start content. We regularly test our player against Chrome 66+, Firefox (w/ media.autoplay.enabled set to false) and macOS Safari 11+ autoplay interference engines.
The below player settings can help fine tuning your autoplay set up.
Note about un-muting: these new policies in Chrome 66+ (and Safari 11+) also affect un-muting of video content or video ads. Specifically a mouseenter or mouseover event is not enough anymore to un-mute content if the user has not interacted with document prior to un-muting (this would cause the player to pause and throw a warning in the browser console). A full click or touchend event is now required.
According to our testing when an iOS 11+ device is in low power mode autoplay even muted is forbidden by the OS. This does not apply to iOS 10 and below. Radiant Media Player will properly handle autoplay requests when low power mode is engaged in iOS 11+ by providing a play button to initiate playback (a user interaction will be needed in such case as autoplay would have failed).
When data saver mode is enabled on Chrome before version 66 for Android autoplay even muted is forbidden by the OS. Note that this only applies to non-https web pages so on an https site (which should be the norm by now) autoplay won't be affected by data saver mode (meaning that muted autoplay will work as usual).
Command the player to autoplay content when init method is called. This works for media content and video ads. On modern mobile devices muted autoplay is supported for media content and video ads. Default: false.
The player knows 3 autoplay mode: autoplay with sound, muted autoplay or no autoplay. When autoplay is enbaled and detectAutoplayCapabilities is set to true, the player will attempt to detect what kind of autoplay mode is allowed on the targeted devices, starting with autoplay with sound, then muted autoplay and finally no autoplay (in which case a play icon is made available to the user to explicitly start playback). Default: true.
Timeout in milliseconds for autoplay to force complete checking. Default: -1 (2500ms in desktop environment, 5000ms in mobile environment).
When using the setSrc API method this setting allows to control the behaviour of player after srcchanged event has fired. When set to true this setting will cause content to autoplay just after srcchanged event. When set to false the player will remain in a pause state after srcchanged event. Default: true. When set to true this setting will only have effect after player has been initialised either through a valid user interaction or successful autoplay request. This setting is also compatible with playlist/related but when srcChangeAutoplay is set to false the playlistUpNextAutoplay and relatedUpNextAutoplay settings are automatically set to false.
Limits the number of autoplay across browser sessions (using localStorage). You may use the resetAutoplayCount API method to reset autoplayCount. Default: Infinity.
This API event will fire when autoplay is set to true and autoplay of content or pre-roll ad was a success.
This API event will fire when autoplay is set to true and autoplay of content or pre-roll ad was a failure (likely due to an autoplay interference engine).
Reset autoplay count set through the autoplayCount setting.
We have tested this set-up when Radiant Media Player is used in an iframe and can confirm this is generally working for Chrome 65+. It is likely other browsers will implement this feature as well in the near future. In case autoplay is blocked due to autoplay feature policy Radiant Media Player shall provide a play button so that playback can be initiated by a user gesture, in such case the autoplayfailure API event shall fire. You should also note the need to use the allowfullscreen attribute in complement to the allow attribute in order to support browsers that do not support allow attribute.
If you are using amp-iframe and autoplay you need to add allow="autoplay" to your amp-iframe element.