LSVT Video Player: Autoplay Policies

This article explains how the LightSpeed VT video player will act with different devices in regards to autoplaying with or without audio.

Recently both Google Chrome and Safari have been moving towards stricter autoplay policies due to misuse of the feature, resulting in poor user experiences.

Because of those policies, our own video autoplay policy will be to mute the audio when unmuted autoplay is not possible.

When a user’s browser does forces the video to be muted upon ‘auto-play’, we have a convenient feature where if they click “unmute” within the first 10 seconds, the video will start over so that they don’t miss the first few things the on screen talent says. If a user unmutes, or mutes the audio after the first 10 seconds it will not restart, assuming that it is intentionally muted.

Here is the expected behavior of our video player across different devices:

Operating System	Device	Browser	LSVT Player Behavior
iOS 11+	iPhone	Safari	Muted Autoplay
iOS 11+	iPhone	Chrome	Muted Autoplay
iOS 11+	iPad	Safari	Muted Autoplay
iOS 11+	iPad	Chrome	Muted Autoplay
iOS 11+	iPad Mini	Safari	Muted Autoplay
Android	Galaxy Tablet	Chrome	Autoplay
Android	Galaxy Tablet	Firefox	Autoplay
Android	Galaxy Tablet	Native	Autoplay
MacOS	Desktop	Safari	Autoplay*
MacOS	Desktop	Chrome	Autoplay*
Windows 10	Desktop	Chrome	Autoplay*
Windows 10	Desktop	Edge	Autoplay*
Windows 10	Desktop	IE11	Autoplay*
Windows 10	Desktop	Firefox	Autoplay*

* = First time visit is muted, subsequent visits / plays are unmuted.

If you’ve previously “blocked” autoplay in Firefox, check out this article for help on resetting that: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/block-autoplay

Note: Our video player plays back video with an adaptive stream – so the best quality video is played back based on the User’s connection. On desktop, Users can override the automated quality detection and set the playback quality themselves.

On mobile, Apple / iOS devices do not allow for a way to change the quality manually, and handles all quality switching automatically.