###TL:DR
Your frustration is shared with a lot of other people.
I think this approach of having in-page video play on page load is very dramatic and can have a powerful effect on the visitor. I also know from years of experience that it won’t work the same way everywhere. Mobile browsers are extraordinarily powerful and fully-featured, but plug-ins are very last-century and are being displaced by more modern standards. If you want to continue using this approach, you’re going to have to segment your site into have and have-not versions for the platforms that are visiting it.
###Limitations you can and cannot control
It’s important in design (or any creative endeavor) to embrace the limitations of your materials. Video is a bandwidth pig, and bandwidth on mobile devices is precious (and often subject to caps and over-limit charges). That’s why nearly all mobile platforms enforce a No Autoplay rule by fiat.
Bandwidth is one of the components of your design, you cannot ever afford to forget it – even on desktop. In today’s over-caffeinated world, you have approximately a tenth of a second to show your visitors something and get them over the white screen of death “hump”. Unless you are presenting your video director’s portfolio, and have explained and warned your audience about the delay (and even then, there’s no pleasing everyone) you are going to have people leave when they can’t have it NOW! And that’s on the desktop. Take a drive into the country, and enjoy the splendor that is ATT “Edge” 2G connectivity. Now realize that a large portion of the country and indeed the world are not anywhere beyond that state of 2007 art.
Without knocking your aesthetic approach one bit – even in a perfect world, where Adobe had figured out how to deliver Flash on a mobile device without cutting the battery life literally in half – you would still need to find a way to cut your movie file sizes down to the point where they were nearly as awful-looking as an animated GIF in order to fit inside the limitations of the radio delivery system.
###Future-orientation
Adobe have acknowledged that mobile Flash was a dream, and they are not going to develop it any further. They have a bunch of new tools coming out that let you convert Flash into open standards JavaScript, CSS, and HTML5 video, and further, to author animated and time-based presentations in those standards from the start. Take a look at Tumult Hype for one excellent example, and I think made just up the road from Freeway, somewhere near Oxford.
###Business decision
You might want to consider your traffic numbers and more importantly your traffic trends, and make a cold-hearted business decision:
- Make two sites, and sniff the browser/platform to divide your audience (twice the effort).
- Create a single site, with careful consideration for the platform that is growing more rapidly than the others* (artistic compromise, advanced scripting).
It’s not perfect, and it’s definitely not going to be easy to do, but I am sure that you can make a choice there that will make business sense.
Walter
*I suspect you will see the line for iDevices going sharply up, and the desktop trending slightly down or flat, depending on the window of time you choose to analyze.
freewaytalk mailing list
email@hidden
Update your subscriptions at:
http://freewaytalk.net/person/options