How will this effect video backgrounds like Airbnb used to have?
There's a concept that the cheaper and more plentiful a resource gets the more it gets wasted and thus, the resource will be scarce again.
The "richness" of media today is often too thick for me to stomach. I don't know why people are so impressed or think it impresses people.
Artifacts in heavily compressed video files are often more acceptable than artefacts in highly compressed still JPEGs, IMO.
It’s worth pointing out that the new auto-play policies apply both to video used as a tool for making something visual happen (like background video or video-as-animated-gif) and also to video that serves as consumable content. We recommend web developers test their site with these new behaviors, ensuring any custom media controls behave correctly when auto-play is disabled, either automatically by Safari or by users.
I.e. you now need to verify that your site still looks good and works well when background video auto-play has been denied.
According to the article, blacklisting (or lack of whitelisting) is also easy to detect by handling the Promise rejection, which means you can easily provide a static fallback for video that's used purely decoratively.