Browser Autoplay Policies

Why web browsers are restricting autoplay

Chrome and Safari are restricting their autoplay capabilities as a result of the continuous misuse of autoplay which causes bad user experiences. These changes are intended to give greater control of playback to users and to benefit publishers with legitimate use cases.

Currently, VIXY supports two types of autoplay:

Unmuted Autoplay: autoplay with audio enabled.
Muted Autoplay: autoplay with audio disabled.

The first type is considered abruptive, while the second type is more user-friendly. Some browsers that normally disallow unmuted autoplay allow it when the viewer explicitly indicates so.

Browser support for Autoplaying videos

Operating System	Browser	Type	Allowed?
iOS	Safari 11	Unmuted Autoplay	No
		Muted Autoplay	Yes
Android	Chrome	Unmuted Autoplay	No
		Muted Autoplay	Yes
MacOS	Safari 10	Unmuted Autoplay	Yes
		Muted Autoplay	Yes
	Safari 11	Unmuted Autoplay	No
		Muted Autoplay	Yes
Windows, MacOS	Chrome 64	Unmuted Autoplay	No
		Muted	Yes

An HTML5 video player can't circumvent these technical limitations, this also applies to the VIXY video player. VIXY offers additional player settings (also available via the API) which enable you to switch between muted and unmuted autoplay where this is allowed.

Default player behaviour

By default, the VIXY player will still autoplay but muted. You can overwrite this behaviour with additional player settings to stop autoplay in unsupported browsers.

How to stop autoplay on browsers where unmuted autoplay is restricted

To overwrite the standard behaviour:

1. Go to the Player Studio in the top navigation bar -> Open a video player

2. Go to the Additional Plugins section on the left (power plug icon)

3. Under UI Variables, add the following key and value:

KEY: autoPlayFallbackToMute

VALUE: false

This overwrites the standard autoPlayFallbackToMute = true behaviour.

For more information on browser autoplay restrictions:

iOS Autoplay policies
https://webkit.org/blog/7734/auto-play-policy-changes-for-macos/
https://webkit.org/blog/6784/new-video-policies-for-ios/

Chrome autoplay policies:
https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2017/09/autoplay-policy-changes