Auto play: DOA?

There’s quite an interesting post at Video Insider about the death of the autoplay function. The three main reasons given are this:

1. Users hate it. Though not the most scientific way of doing research apparently searching twitter for autoplay video reveals some fairly heavy loathing of the function. I think this is like blog comments though. You can’t legislate for the people who have a lot of time on their hands and like to play on the internet.

2. It’s not real pre-roll. Having video be user-initiated is much more valuable to the advertiser because it’s being served to people who have more of an interest in the service.

3. It increases the cost of running the site. No doubt about that. Video is a bandwidth hog and you’re getting charged for server usage even if they’re not watching it.

All these things are true but the one that’s crucially missing is this - for those of us in the corporate video market, where a film is placed on a website and is asking to take up more than 30 seconds of a user’s time then analytics is a crucial part of the mix. Understanding who is receiving your message and how much of it they’re taking on board is crucial. So having a film initiated by the user is extremely important. This may sound like a repetition of point 2 but they’re talking about ads and pre-roll, we’re talking about the the corporate world where the video is the message, it isn’t the pill you have to swallow before you get to the message.

If a video autoplays then you’re losing the value of your analytics. If the viewer is asked to engage, and they do so, then the analytics become extremely valuable. For every second they keep watching you’re getting good feedback to improve, refine and ultimately sell.