Hotmail Kind-of Sort-of Announces HTML5 Video Support
So Hotmail now supports HTML5 video in email. This is a major development in the video-in-email saga, but it’s not a bullet-proof solution… yet.
Once the email is opened and images are displayed, the user must right-click on the video and select Play. This is due to Hotmail stripping out the <video> tag by default. Unsurprisingly, IE 7/8 doesn’t support HTML5 video yet, so you must have fallback content (such as an image) in place for users browsing the web with IE. Safari does not allow for right-click enabled playback, so fallback content is completely necessary here, as well.
Ros at CampaignMonitor brings up a good point in regards to autoplay in that having a video automatically play in users’ inboxes is likely to be a huge annoyance and will ultimately be a great way of encouraging users to unsubscribe. Food for thought.
All in all, this is not a solution that has been fully-realized, but it is only a relatively short matter of time before its fleshed out to the point where videos in email is viable and worth pursing in future efforts.
Posted by Bryan Quilty on Jul. 20, 2011
Comments
According to Litmus, Hotmail still has a relatively high global market-share percentage, at 13.13%.
http://litmus.com/help/email-clients/hotmail/hotmail-stats
Posted by Bryan Quilty on 08/09/2011 09:48 AM
This would be fantastic if we can use this across all mail clients!
Posted by Christopher Mitchell on 08/09/2011 09:53 AM
Wow, do people still use Hotmail? Don’t they have a vanishingly-small percentage of the email market?
Posted by Charleen Larson on 08/01/2011 06:21 PM