Add Feature: Playlist for Web SDK

Requests
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The native SDKs for iOS and Android received an update for gapless playback of multiple VoDs last year. For more details on what this enables see this blog post

The feature is important for showing a collection of smaller videos with seamless playback and optionally a seek bar covering all videos in the playlist. It could also be used to improve the UX of the “recommended next” feature.

It’s important to implement this in the bitmovin core since at least these two problems can not be worked around and hinder great UX:

  • seamless playback transitions between the videos requires timely buffering of the upcoming asset. This can’t be done outside the player core while still providing autoplay on restrictive browsers (e.g. iOS). Because autoplay is more important we have to live with gaps between the video assets since buffering is not always possible. Furthermore without buffering the initial quality of the videos will unnecessarily be lower than possible with buffering.

  • a seek bar showing all playlist assets is currently not possible with the bitmovin UI on the web

This feature would also be important to have feature parity across all SDKs again.

2 Likes
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Hi Simon, thanks for posting this feature request. Extending playlist support to web isn’t on our current roadmap. Primarily that’s due to differences we see in the nature of watching on mobile, compared to big screen devices, where our web player is used. On mobile we see regular use cases for viewers watching shorter clips - and those can be in a playlist - whereas on web we see more focus on longer form content and live events. As such, the playlist feature has helped to improve mobile viewer experiences with the seamless transitions you mention, however, on web we are putting greater emphasis on high quality, performant playback on big screen devices, with a particular focus currently on SSAI streams.

We’ll certainly keep an eye on your feature request here and whether this is of interest to our other community members (please post or vote if so). Additionally, we’ll be making some framework updates to our web player later this year and this may open up new possibilities so please stay tuned for more on that topic in the coming months, or in the meantime check out our latest blog: Developing a Video Player with Structured Concurrency