Apple is relaxing its controls on autoplay videos in Safari with the release of iOS 10, allowing silent or muted videos to start automatically. A post on the WebKit blog explains the rationale behind the changes as an effort to keep up with new display needs, as developers integrate more video elements into their sites.
Some of those pages don’t work on iOS 9 due to user gesture requirements, so Apple is relaxing its restrictions. Silent or muted video will be allowed to play, while video with an audio track will load but be paused.
Autoplay elements will only play when visible on the screen and will pause if they become non-visible as the user scrolls past them.
Videos encoded to play inline will also stop defaulting to full screen playback. Jer Noble, the author of the blog post, said Apple hopes the new changes will make video more useful in iOS without making too much of an added demand on the user’s bandwidth and battery life, given the progress that’s been made in encoding videos in smaller file sizes over the years.
