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> The Block Autoplay feature is enhanced to give users the option to block any video that automatically starts playing, not just those that automatically play w

> The Block Autoplay feature is enhanced to give users the option to block any video that automatically starts playing, not just those that automatically play with sound. Good. I know a news website that was on purpose disabling sound on videos to prevent that. So not only does it autoplay, you need to click to unmute anyway to actually hear it! Why do news websites want to shove autoplaying videos on people's throats so much, what's wrong with playing at any time when you want? And why do news websites even care about doing shoving it to the small percentage of people who actually bother to disable autoplay in their browser? P.S. I already had autoplay for videos without sound disabled through about:config flags, but some videos managed to autoplay anyway. I wonder if they also fixed that issue, or simply made the about:config flag part of the settings dialog.

MatekCopatek 7y ago
> Why do news websites want to shove autoplaying videos on people's throats so much Advertising metrics. > And why do news websites even care about doing shoving it to the small percentage of people who actually bother to disable autoplay in their browser? I believe autoplay is off by default on mobile, so it's a significant market.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
cmrdporcupine 7y ago
Good. I live rural and have heavily metered LTE as my Internet, or else it's really slow satellite or P2P wireless. Auto-play video is the bane of my existence; every website seems to assume these days that if you're on desktop, you have giant bandwidth.
notjustanymike 7y ago
CPCV, Cost Per Completed View. Advertisers pay more for completed ad views.
pier25 7y ago
Yes, thank god. I've never understood why news sites push silent video down your throat. They are wasting serious amounts bandwidth.
tasty_freeze 7y ago
Fantastic news for people, like me, who spend a lot of time with $10/GB hotspot data prices. I'd click a link to a 5KB news article only to find it streaming HD video of talking heads reading the article.
- jszymborski 7y ago
  Or even worse (and anecdotally more common), a video that is hardly relevant or from a year-old story.
- Carpetsmoker 7y ago
  > 5KB news article On what site do you find "5KB news articles"? Pretty much all news sites that I know of load a gigantic amount of useless and obnoxious JavaScript, CSS, images, etc. with or without video.
  - fnord123 7y ago
    NPR + rejecting cookies under their GDPR scheme makes the page a dream.
    - c0vfefe 7y ago
      Also note https://text.npr.org/ https://text.npr.org/
  - GeekyBear 7y ago
    There is still a text only version of NPR that is exceptionally lightweight. https://text.npr.org/ https://text.npr.org/
    - MarcysVonEylau 7y ago
      They probably thought they're pulling a number on GDPR compliance, but created the best news reading experience in process...
  - ticmasta 7y ago
AbsoluteDestiny 7y ago
Video codecs compress better than GIFs, so auto playing video elements can be used for this.
- goatlover 7y ago
  But why does a news article need video?
  - ferzul 7y ago
    when you're tired after work, watching a video is easier than reading. the longer you're watching videos on top-quality-journalism.example.com the longer they can serve you ads
weaksauce 7y ago
there is a preference now that lets you block both audio and video inside about:preferences | security & privacy | autoplay permissions. so you probably don't need to do the about:config thing.
octosphere 7y ago
Glad. I do affiliate marketing, and as part of my research into this area I have to look at hundreds of landing pages with talking heads explaining how to buy cheap cialis. One notable ploy they use is autoplaying audio & video to grab your attention. Little do they realize that users instantly find the offending video and close the tab. Autoplay actually increases the churn rate.
hota_mazi 7y ago
> Why do news websites want to shove autoplaying videos on people's throats so much, what's wrong with playing at any time when you want? Probably so they can show advertisers that every month, they stream XXX terabytes of video, thereby getting these advertisers to pay them more money. Not technically a lie as long as you don't pretend people are actually watching these videos.
- tjoff 7y ago
  The fascinating part is how advertisers fall for that every time. How can this still be a problem?
  - ferzul 7y ago
    if everyone does it, maybe it becomes a useful metric of how many user-hours you get?
acdha 7y ago
> Why do news websites want to shove autoplaying videos on people's throats so much, what's wrong with playing at any time when you want? There was a bubble awhile back when advertisers were being told that video had better metrics, and all of the news sites jumped on higher-paying ads. That seems to have tapered off as advertisers noticed poor returns and learned that Facebook had been massively misrepresenting the metrics (https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/10/advertisers-allege-facebook-hid-the-fact-that-no-one-watches-video-ads/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/10/advertisers-alle...) but it’ll take years to de-pivot everyone’s shiny new toys and the staffing invested in producing low information density content.
- smilbandit 7y ago
  decades probably, I still have people insisting on getting their meta keywords right is of top tier importance. i blame libraries keeping old online marketing how to books from the 90's on the shelves.
- CommieBobDole 7y ago
  We may never be free of it; it's gone on long enough that there's a whole generation that's grown up thinking it's normal to get information by watching a five minute video that conveys the same information as five lines of text.
  - xvector 7y ago
    People that choose 5-minute videos over 5 lines of text probably aren't doing it because they can't do the latter. They do the former to fill time. Popcorn for the brain, if you're bored.
    - mikekchar 7y ago
      I often wonder, why are people so bored? I'm fighting off doing my typical "old man rant" but I often hear people dream of a life where they have no responsibilities, but then I notice that most people fill their time with fluff -- because they are bored. I do it myself, even! Fun fact: I'm on HN posting this post, not because this is what I want to do, but because it was the easiest thing I could think of starting to do after I finished up some work. If only it were easier to aim at stuff that I actually want to do... Hmmm...
hayd 7y ago
Yesterday I was reading an article and, part way through, a video started playing on the sidebar. I saw it, thought it looked interesting, but wanted to finish the article before watching. I paused the video. As I scrolled further the video resumed (reproducibly). By the time I'd finished the article it was auto-playing a new video, and there was no way to find the original.
rhizome 7y ago
Why do news websites want to shove autoplaying videos on people's throats so much, what's wrong with playing at any time when you want? Because forced exposure to advertising pays better than letting you decide when to consume it (if you ever do).
3xblah 7y ago
"Why do websites want to shove autoplaying videos on people's throats so much, what's wrong with playing at any time you want?" Perhaps the websites (website owners) are not the only ones who are motivated to push for inclusion of autoplaying videos. Some sources suggest ad fraud is one of the major drivers of online advertising.1 Sources also suggest that video works especially well for ad fraud.2,3,4 If there is a shift toward using video for advertising,5 then it makes sense that commercial websites would prefer ads (videos) to be shown (play) to the visitor automatically (autoplay). It stands to reason that commercially-funded browser authors, e.g., Firefox,6 will always want to implement features that cater to its primary stakeholders: commercial websites and the online ad industry. 1 https://digiday.com/media/daily-hourly-fight-digital-ad-fraud-worse-ever/ https://digiday.com/media/daily-hourly-fight-digital-ad-frau... 2 https://digiday.com/media/state-of-video-ad-fraud/ https://digiday.com/media/state-of-video-ad-fraud/ 3 https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/in-banner-video-ad-fraud https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/in-banne... 4 http://www.adotas.com/2017/12/video-ad-fraudand-matter/ http://www.adotas.com/2017/12/video-ad-fraudand-matter/ 5 https://digiday.com/media/publishers-pivoting-video-5-charts/ https://digiday.com/media/publishers-pivoting-video-5-charts... 6 https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/041315/how-mozilla-firefox-and-google-chrome-make-money.asp https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/041315/how-m...
nhebb 7y ago
I was excited for a second, but ESPN's site still autoplays videos, e.g.: https://www.espn.com/college-football/boxscore?gameId=401110723 https://www.espn.com/college-football/boxscore?gameId=401110...
IfOnlyYouKnew 7y ago
There's about a thousand cynical answers to your question, but the truth is simply that not everyone is like your (or me): all measures (return visits, pages/visit, conversions, etc) just happen to be better for autoplaying video. I would totally agree with you and the others that it's an annoying practice. Yet then again when I blanket-banned autoplay, I was annoyed by youtube videos no longer doing it. Turns out we like it where we expect it. Just not from random google results to sites we rarely visit.
- bscphil 7y ago
  We like it on pages where the only reason to go to the page is to view the video. In these cases, autoplay saves time. And they're clearly distinct from cases where someone might go to a page for reasons other than viewing that video. (Examples: a news site with a text story, Youtube's channel pages)
khaledh 7y ago
Just bookmark https://www.bbc.com/news https://www.bbc.com/news and you'll be happy.
Wowfunhappy 7y ago
That's going to break textural videos too, isn't it? :( Kind of silly that animated gifs will continue to work fine, but as soon as you try to use a format that doesn't take up a ridiculous amount of bandwidth...
bscphil 7y ago
> I know a news website that was on purpose disabling sound on videos to prevent that. So not only does it autoplay, you need to click to unmute anyway to actually hear it! Twitch does this, which is very annoying, because (on Firefox for Android) I have to unmute the video every time. As far as I know there's no way to allow audio to autoplay on a specific site on FfA. Hopefully this moves web developers in the direction of either requesting autoplay permission (if they need it) or not autoplaying at all.
thirdsun 7y ago
Not to mention the waste of bandwidth - imagine being on a metered connection and forgetting a Bloomberg tab in the background. It will happily stream a neverending series of videos for hours if I remember correctly.

MatekCopatek 7y ago

> Why do news websites want to shove autoplaying videos on people's throats so much Advertising metrics. > And why do news websites even care about doing shoving it to the small percentage of people who actually bother to disable autoplay in their browser? I believe autoplay is off by default on mobile, so it's a significant market.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

cmrdporcupine 7y ago

Good. I live rural and have heavily metered LTE as my Internet, or else it's really slow satellite or P2P wireless. Auto-play video is the bane of my existence; every website seems to assume these days that if you're on desktop, you have giant bandwidth.

notjustanymike 7y ago

CPCV, Cost Per Completed View. Advertisers pay more for completed ad views.

pier25 7y ago

Yes, thank god. I've never understood why news sites push silent video down your throat. They are wasting serious amounts bandwidth.

tasty_freeze 7y ago

Fantastic news for people, like me, who spend a lot of time with $10/GB hotspot data prices. I'd click a link to a 5KB news article only to find it streaming HD video of talking heads reading the article.

jszymborski 7y ago
Or even worse (and anecdotally more common), a video that is hardly relevant or from a year-old story.
Carpetsmoker 7y ago
> 5KB news article On what site do you find "5KB news articles"? Pretty much all news sites that I know of load a gigantic amount of useless and obnoxious JavaScript, CSS, images, etc. with or without video.
- fnord123 7y ago
  NPR + rejecting cookies under their GDPR scheme makes the page a dream.
  - c0vfefe 7y ago
    Also note https://text.npr.org/ https://text.npr.org/
- GeekyBear 7y ago
  There is still a text only version of NPR that is exceptionally lightweight. https://text.npr.org/ https://text.npr.org/
  - MarcysVonEylau 7y ago
    They probably thought they're pulling a number on GDPR compliance, but created the best news reading experience in process...
- ticmasta 7y ago

AbsoluteDestiny 7y ago

Video codecs compress better than GIFs, so auto playing video elements can be used for this.

goatlover 7y ago
But why does a news article need video?
- ferzul 7y ago
  when you're tired after work, watching a video is easier than reading. the longer you're watching videos on top-quality-journalism.example.com the longer they can serve you ads

weaksauce 7y ago

there is a preference now that lets you block both audio and video inside about:preferences | security & privacy | autoplay permissions. so you probably don't need to do the about:config thing.

octosphere 7y ago

Glad. I do affiliate marketing, and as part of my research into this area I have to look at hundreds of landing pages with talking heads explaining how to buy cheap cialis. One notable ploy they use is autoplaying audio & video to grab your attention. Little do they realize that users instantly find the offending video and close the tab. Autoplay actually increases the churn rate.

hota_mazi 7y ago

> Why do news websites want to shove autoplaying videos on people's throats so much, what's wrong with playing at any time when you want? Probably so they can show advertisers that every month, they stream XXX terabytes of video, thereby getting these advertisers to pay them more money. Not technically a lie as long as you don't pretend people are actually watching these videos.

tjoff 7y ago
The fascinating part is how advertisers fall for that every time. How can this still be a problem?
- ferzul 7y ago
  if everyone does it, maybe it becomes a useful metric of how many user-hours you get?

acdha 7y ago

> Why do news websites want to shove autoplaying videos on people's throats so much, what's wrong with playing at any time when you want? There was a bubble awhile back when advertisers were being told that video had better metrics, and all of the news sites jumped on higher-paying ads. That seems to have tapered off as advertisers noticed poor returns and learned that Facebook had been massively misrepresenting the metrics (https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/10/advertisers-allege-facebook-hid-the-fact-that-no-one-watches-video-ads/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/10/advertisers-alle...) but it’ll take years to de-pivot everyone’s shiny new toys and the staffing invested in producing low information density content.

smilbandit 7y ago
decades probably, I still have people insisting on getting their meta keywords right is of top tier importance. i blame libraries keeping old online marketing how to books from the 90's on the shelves.
CommieBobDole 7y ago
We may never be free of it; it's gone on long enough that there's a whole generation that's grown up thinking it's normal to get information by watching a five minute video that conveys the same information as five lines of text.
- xvector 7y ago
  People that choose 5-minute videos over 5 lines of text probably aren't doing it because they can't do the latter. They do the former to fill time. Popcorn for the brain, if you're bored.
  - mikekchar 7y ago
    I often wonder, why are people so bored? I'm fighting off doing my typical "old man rant" but I often hear people dream of a life where they have no responsibilities, but then I notice that most people fill their time with fluff -- because they are bored. I do it myself, even! Fun fact: I'm on HN posting this post, not because this is what I want to do, but because it was the easiest thing I could think of starting to do after I finished up some work. If only it were easier to aim at stuff that I actually want to do... Hmmm...

hayd 7y ago

Yesterday I was reading an article and, part way through, a video started playing on the sidebar. I saw it, thought it looked interesting, but wanted to finish the article before watching. I paused the video. As I scrolled further the video resumed (reproducibly). By the time I'd finished the article it was auto-playing a new video, and there was no way to find the original.

rhizome 7y ago

Why do news websites want to shove autoplaying videos on people's throats so much, what's wrong with playing at any time when you want? Because forced exposure to advertising pays better than letting you decide when to consume it (if you ever do).

3xblah 7y ago

"Why do websites want to shove autoplaying videos on people's throats so much, what's wrong with playing at any time you want?" Perhaps the websites (website owners) are not the only ones who are motivated to push for inclusion of autoplaying videos. Some sources suggest ad fraud is one of the major drivers of online advertising.1 Sources also suggest that video works especially well for ad fraud.2,3,4 If there is a shift toward using video for advertising,5 then it makes sense that commercial websites would prefer ads (videos) to be shown (play) to the visitor automatically (autoplay). It stands to reason that commercially-funded browser authors, e.g., Firefox,6 will always want to implement features that cater to its primary stakeholders: commercial websites and the online ad industry. 1 https://digiday.com/media/daily-hourly-fight-digital-ad-fraud-worse-ever/ https://digiday.com/media/daily-hourly-fight-digital-ad-frau... 2 https://digiday.com/media/state-of-video-ad-fraud/ https://digiday.com/media/state-of-video-ad-fraud/ 3 https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/in-banner-video-ad-fraud https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/in-banne... 4 http://www.adotas.com/2017/12/video-ad-fraudand-matter/ http://www.adotas.com/2017/12/video-ad-fraudand-matter/ 5 https://digiday.com/media/publishers-pivoting-video-5-charts/ https://digiday.com/media/publishers-pivoting-video-5-charts... 6 https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/041315/how-mozilla-firefox-and-google-chrome-make-money.asp https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/041315/how-m...

nhebb 7y ago

I was excited for a second, but ESPN's site still autoplays videos, e.g.: https://www.espn.com/college-football/boxscore?gameId=401110723 https://www.espn.com/college-football/boxscore?gameId=401110...

IfOnlyYouKnew 7y ago

There's about a thousand cynical answers to your question, but the truth is simply that not everyone is like your (or me): all measures (return visits, pages/visit, conversions, etc) just happen to be better for autoplaying video. I would totally agree with you and the others that it's an annoying practice. Yet then again when I blanket-banned autoplay, I was annoyed by youtube videos no longer doing it. Turns out we like it where we expect it. Just not from random google results to sites we rarely visit.

bscphil 7y ago
We like it on pages where the only reason to go to the page is to view the video. In these cases, autoplay saves time. And they're clearly distinct from cases where someone might go to a page for reasons other than viewing that video. (Examples: a news site with a text story, Youtube's channel pages)

khaledh 7y ago

Just bookmark https://www.bbc.com/news https://www.bbc.com/news and you'll be happy.

Wowfunhappy 7y ago

That's going to break textural videos too, isn't it? :( Kind of silly that animated gifs will continue to work fine, but as soon as you try to use a format that doesn't take up a ridiculous amount of bandwidth...

bscphil 7y ago

> I know a news website that was on purpose disabling sound on videos to prevent that. So not only does it autoplay, you need to click to unmute anyway to actually hear it! Twitch does this, which is very annoying, because (on Firefox for Android) I have to unmute the video every time. As far as I know there's no way to allow audio to autoplay on a specific site on FfA. Hopefully this moves web developers in the direction of either requesting autoplay permission (if they need it) or not autoplaying at all.

thirdsun 7y ago

Not to mention the waste of bandwidth - imagine being on a metered connection and forgetting a Bloomberg tab in the background. It will happily stream a neverending series of videos for hours if I remember correctly.