Auto - Play

[Simon]

On video pages what are peoples' thoughts about auto-play for clips?

As a surfer?

As a promoting webmaster?

As a program owner / producer?

What are the advantages of having it enabled or not with your video players?

Thoughts?

[Gaystoryman]

as a surfer, affiliate, i'd prefer no auto play, given many have sound tracks, could be rather shocking if the guy is watching on his lunch break, on his ipod or whatever. whistle

my pennies worth (cuz the loonie is worth more now)

[gaydemon]

That's a very good question I would like to know as well.

For queerpixels I did:

Autoplay on the video pages itself, I figured if a surfers go to watch a movie I might as well start playing / buffering as soon as the page loads.

I put Autoplay OFF on shared videos, the ones people would use on their blogs etc. Otherwise you end up loosing bandwidth + the blog / site owner ends up having several videos all playing at the same time.

[RandomPlayer]

Keep in mind the bandwidth usage will be much higher when using Auto-Play...I would say 20-30% higher

[astro-boi]

I'm curious about auto playing embedded youtube clips. Would people mind me doing that if it is the first post on the main page?

[BelAmiAlan]

I cannot stand autoplay anywhere. As a surfer it bothers me when I go to a site and a video starts to play, plus I have not adjusted my volume nor know where my volume is. If I'm alone or with people it bothers me just as much.

[tim]

As a surfer, mostly by far it really annoys me, since you asked. As an affiliate, I will not put videos on autoplay on my sites. Sometimes I go to a site and I start hearing some kind of video playing that I don't see, then I have to stop what I'm doing and scroll around to find it and shut it off, and it won't shut off sometimes. Some sites have more than one autoplay on a page so you hear a couple at a time, which is really odd. Just my own thoughts, not a rant.

[gaydemon]

I'm curious about auto playing embedded youtube clips. Would people mind me doing that if it is the first post on the main page?

I don't think it's a good idea on any main page, be it a blog or any other site. Simply because you will have people landing on that page not necessarily knowing what to expect. Plus it will also hinder load times, people are known to simply close a page if it takes too long. And what if you have more than 1 video on the same page, having them all playing simultaneously isn't a great thing either.