I guess the new Chrome policy will be ok for most people but it's going to be yet another annoyance for me. They might be at work, or surfing in bed with somebody asleep next to them. No sorry, this is the internet, all someone has done to end up at your site is click a link, they might not know what it is, maybe they're listening to an amazing album on their great sound system via their computer and don't want it interrupted by bleeps. This is what everyone who ever builds anything thinks though, that their thing is the exception, it really is ok just in this one case.
I understand that creators might say "if you're on my site you're there for the full experience". For extra non-hatred, don't use a dark pattern. But as an individual user I personally never want any sound or video autoplaying on a website, ever, for any reason. I don't think the artist is evil, it does sound like particularly annoying stuff for him to have to deal with. Thinking you shouldn't have to do any of this extra stuff is prima-donna-ish in my opinion. But if you want to do something with your work other than letting it sit in storage you have to do the other bits too. None of it is present in my mind when I'm working on a painting because I'm in the zone. This stuff goes alongside and is complementary to the creative work. But unfortunately you still have to do things like pay bills and go to the toilet just like "the others". Yes, as an artist the whole point is to keep exploring and creating. But it doesn't have to be technical, artists might spend time organising exhibitions, making canvases, sourcing materials. Sometimes browsers change and I have to go and change my websites accordingly.
I'm thinking of technical stuff like (as a painter) taking good quality photos of my work, fixing colour accuracy of those photos in software, writing code to process images into various sizes etc. I'm an artist and if I want people to be able to access my work I have to do boring stuff to make that happen. So yeah, if you have client-side preroll, just don’t autoplay I guess.
If it fails, you’re gonna see weird errors in IMA3, or at the video player level, none of which really help you decide how to gracefully handle the situation. You have to tell the video player to autoplay a video a.m3u8, but swap that out for preroll.m3u8 before you know if any of it is going to work at all. I’m not sure how to even approach Chrome deciding to autoplay “sometimes”. Ultimately the right solution is to just-don’t-autoplay-ever, but it’s a hard sell when you see a 20-40% drop in VOD begins when you remove autoplay. There’s no browser api that tells you if autoplay is supported, and you won’t get meaningful errors when you try to autoplay when you can’t. Autoplay has been one of the most difficult differences to manage across browsers. Preroll (IMA3) integration with an HTML5 video player is a really tricky dance when you’re trying to support mobile/desktop browsers with a resilient and consistent video player experience.