Changes to Mumsnet Video

[TimMumsnet]

Hi guys, last night we released a change to the way Mumsnet video works on Talk desktop - we'd love to hear your thoughts.

As a trial on the pregnancy topic, we've started autoplaying different Mumsnet pregnancy videos (on mute, of course). This is to help introduce our users to Mumsnet's original videos.

You can see an example here. What do you think?

I'd add an option to turn off autoplay in customise for those with slower internet connections/limited data.

If you want to catch people's attention with autoplaying videos they should have captions on. Unmuted autoplay is horrible, so I'm glad they don't have sound, but I saw one earlier and didn't notice it until halfway through and didn't have a scooby what it was about (pineapples, balloons? WTF?) so it didn't encourage me to turn on the sound or keep watching. Whereas I tend to find on FB sometimes a video will autoplay with captions and it catches my attention and I'll stick around to watch it.

TBH I am not really interested in MN video as I am here for the text content, but those are my thoughts.

Thanks @BertieBots, that's really helpful.

We've setup the video to only autoplay after the page has loaded, this means the page-load speed shouldn't be reduced. You're also absolutely right about captions - the challenge is YouTube captions are super-small, so we may need to introduce our own captions.