Video autoplay on Apple.com?

What follows is good enough reason for Apple to not have auto-loading video on its front page.

http://kdough.net/gallery/mac_ad_crash/PICT0013

As the guy said, "the ironing [sic] is delicious".

Apple has been using QuickTime autoplay on their home page for many months, at least since the intro of the Intel Macs. Their early implementations simply had luscious cinemation of their products, whooshing across the screen in a dramatic and sexy manner. The current series of ads, of course, is the first time they're using sound and unashamedly, outright _selling_ their product (as opposed to subtly drawing us in with moving eye candy), which means that their business strategy is to capture the attention of PC owners who visit the site (whang them on the side of the head with smart humor and compelling reasons to consider Mac ownership). They seem to have realized that a lot of visitors to apple.com are non-Mac people, curious about the computers or software or iPods, and Apple is aggresively hitting them with their sales message.

I've often found the info on the home page of apple.com pretty thin, mostly because it _is_ set up as a sales page: one big picture of a featured product (in this case, the series of auot-play ads), a news feed of press releases, four small pictures of other products for sale, and a series of links, the first two being to the Apple Store and to the Apple resellers. It's a sales page, not a "latest news" page.

If you want a good Apple home page, change from apple.com to Apple's Start page (http://www.apple.com/startpage/), which, while still oriented to Mac sales, emphasizes the varied content of all of Apple's site: what's hot at iTunes, Pro news, game news, and lots of their general interest, Mac-related articles, all gathered in one handy, attractively designed location.

I think it's annoying, not because of the Video itself, but because the QuickTime plugin takes so long to load, freezing up my browser for quite a while.

You can turn off auto play in system prefs -> QT...

Irritating for me - in my classroom this week every time a student clicks on Safari it starts playing and saps some productivity away. I've since used Workgroup Manager to change the default homepage though.

Cardinal Rule:

Web Sites Should be Seen and Not Heard.

Why do a few million people have to adjust their preferences in Quicktime because Apple doesnt understand how to use cookies?

Why do web designers/developers have to abuse new technology? When the blinking tag was first used, people went nuts and over did it. When backgrounds came into vogue with Netscape 2.2 - people went nuts. When Flash first made the scene, again - people went nuts. Now I guess it's videos turn. What a bunch of rookies.

Most annoying for slow connections & slower systems.

Bad practice.

In this case (from Apple) I don't mind it personally when I'm on a heavy duty internet connection IF they do a browser + machine + speed detection. The Apple page for me loads just as fast, but then it continues to download at 300+KB/s for a while.

It also bugs me

The chances are that someone from the web team put this up without first confirming it with other departments - because the bandwidth bill this will create is going to be absolutely insane.

I know this is Apple and they can afford it - but they pulled live keynotes because of how much they were costing - this'll be 10 times more expensive..

It's pretty annoying how departments don't liase. On the Apple UK Site, videos are encoded very badly and look rubbish. How can Apple expect people to use H.264 when they don't use it themselves? [on the UK site anyway]