Your video may cause embarrassment
Should video autoplay on a website? On the face of it, it sounds likes a good idea, after all, if Facebook does it, why shouldn’t you?. Where can be the harm in showing visitors your products and services? After all, the video is a powerful sales tool.
Here are five reasons why we would advise against it.
1) Just because people are visiting your site, don’t assume that they will want to hear about your latest promotion. Also, this may be the tenth time they have been to your site and may very well get a little irritated at being force-fed the same video again.
2) If you’re one that likes to listen to music while browsing the web, it can be extremely annoying to have some uninvited audio bust into the track you are listening to.
3) Imagine someone in an office full of people having a sneaky five minutes to look at your site. It could be quite embarrassing for them to have a video suddenly blare out and alert everyone to what they are doing, it might even lead to them getting the sack!
Playing unsolicited video to people can get you publicity you don’t want!
4) Statistics suggest that more than 50 percent of browsers will be using a mobile device. Is it polite to use someone else’s bandwidth to play them a video that they haven’t asked for?
5) Facebook is choosing to autoplay videos leading to complaints from people who have seen some disturbing footage that they didn’t ask for. Not that your videos are offensive, but why even risk offending potential customers.
So for those reasons we think that auto-playing video with audio is probably the wrong way to go. However, moving images have been proven to make sales so go ahead and put the videos on your site, just give people the option of whether to play them or not. You might also consider running a silent video on the front of your site which can be just as powerful.
VideoandWeb.com