[cheald]

The proliferation of HTML5 video support in browsers has made the player massively less of a concern than it used to be. I recently led a move of my employer's video hosting (many TBs worth of video) from a third-party platform to an in-house solution and it was quite a lot simpler than one might expect.

Video is super expensive in terms of bandwidth, but the technical pipeline for ingesting, transcoding, delivering, and presenting it is extremely simple now.

[EpicEng]

>extremely simple

Yet nearly every time I use a player that isn't YouTube's it stinks. Cursor doesn't disappear. Inconsistent interaction model (does double click move in/out of full screen? Do the arrow keys work? Does 'm' mute? Etc.)

It's not just about the ability to play a video, you have to get the UX right as well, and most don't.

[FridgeSeal]

Not just the UX, the performance as well: there are few things more infuriating than going to pause an autoplaying video, but you can't, because it slows down scrolling on the whole web page. Then you finally get your mouse over it and if you're unlucky enough that the controls have disappeared you've got to wait for whatever 1 sec+ latency for them to re-appear. Then you've got to click them - an action once again, slave to huge amounts of latency provided it even works the first time. Then once it's paused (if it had started playing), you've just got to hope that it won't just continue loading the rest of the video in the background.

[EpicEng]

Definitely. Performance at scale is tough to get right here.

[thomastjeffery]

At scale? You only have one player.

[EpicEng]

Yeah, fair enough. Forgot we were talking specifically about the player here.

[mulmen]

On the web the only usable player I interact with is YouTube. No other site has video that I would describe as watchable.