Since Chrome 66 in April 2018, Google Chrome has blocked videos and players with sound from auto-playing until the visitor has interacted with the page, and the policy still applies in current versions, including Chrome 153. When someone lands on your homepage, your player won’t auto-play unless they've already engaged with your site. Google explains the reasoning behind the change:

“Web browsers are moving towards stricter auto-play policies in order to improve the user experience, minimize incentives to install ad blockers, and reduce data consumption on expensive and/or constrained networks.”

Key Takeaways

• The problem: Chrome blocks audio and video from auto-playing until the visitor has interacted with the page, so embedded players won't start on their own.
• Turn off auto-play: Disable it on your player and offer a clear button that opens a pop-out player, so listeners can keep browsing while it plays.
• Make the listen link obvious: Point visitors to a dedicated listen page or your stream link with a prominent call to action. 
• Muted video still works: Background videos will autoplay if you add the muted attribute, and visitors can unmute them by interacting.

What Can I Do About It?

If your player is embedded on your radio station website, all your listeners that come to your site on Google Chrome will not automatically hear your broadcasts when the page loads. There are a couple of ways to work around this.

Turn off Auto-Play

If auto play is enabled, it causes an issue in Chrome when people click the play button on your player. Instead, you should turn off auto-play, and instead, set up a button for listeners to click that opens a pop out player instead. That way the listeners can still browse your site while listening to your station because it will be playing through a different window.

Clear Call to Action

You could also make it clear to listeners where they can actually listen in to your station, by providing links that redirect them to a player or simply to your streaming link.

What About My Videos?

If you have videos on your website, like in a header or promotional videos for your station, and these are set to auto-play whenever anyone loads up your website, then they will no longer auto-play on Google Chrome.

However, there is a way to fix this! You can adjust your videos to auto-play by muting the audio. They will become unmuted if the person interacts with the video though and the actual visual content will still play.

To do this, you need to adjust the HTML code of the video to use “muted autoplay”, just like the example below:

<video id="video" muted="" autoplay=""> <button id="unmuteButton"></button> </video>

This code tells the browser that there is no audio in the video so it is okay to continue auto-playing the visuals. It also creates an unmute button that the person can click if they want to listen to the video as well.