Does the benefit redditors? No.
Based on the testing so far the mobile player is not ready for prime time nor is the backend video infrastructure. Videos lag horribly and spin sometimes forever .. as if the connection was broken.
Captive content ecosystems, despite their widely-recognized drawbacks, aren't devoid of engagement. Vine was a captive content ecosystem whose attributes resulted in many creative works; Snapchat and its Facebook-run clones -- most notably the Stories inside Instagram -- are another, where the content is made and consumed by the official app and never escapes out onto the public web. As an extreme example, Hulu is a captive content ecosystem where all the content happens to be professionally produced.
Captive content ecosystems are excellent places to sell ads, because you track the user's content consumption habits, and control the client such that they can't easily avoid the ads using technical means.
Other than YouTube are there any web video players that are ready for prime time? Facebook's player is as much of a nightmare of usability as would be expected from the rest of their site, it's unusable for me on both an iPhone 6s in their native app and on the web. Netflix does a good job in their apps but I haven't used their web player in years, is it any good?
News sites seem to love auto-playing videos that don't actually play but still follow the visitor through the page. If the videos do play I can look forward to my laptop fans ('14 RMBP) immediately kicking into high gear. Is this the experience I can look forward to on Reddit?
Outside Youtube I can't think of a single video player I would even call usable, forget polished.
Some other good web video players:
- Vimeo - Hulu
HBO Now's web player is pretty good, tho not great. They definitely seem to have a hard time with their backend some times (e.g. around season premieres of Game of Thrones).
In general tho, video playback is just the latest spiritual incarnation of popup ads.
No. It is not.
In my experience, video stutters and splits even in Windows with 2 rx480s, and refuses to work in GNU/Linux.
Netflix's web player is great, except that it limits you to 720p.
DRM is hard (it's really an impossible pipe dream, but that's another conversation). Getting any sort of "DRM" to work in a browser with a good UI/UX is difficult, and most of the huge media providers (HBO, Vudu, etc.) are still using outdated, buggy, sluggish flash-based methods. The only decent video player using "DRM" that I know of is Netflix, which still has arbitrary limitations, like 720p video.
I can't speak to what they would use for a CDN.
Decoding support in HTML5 is pretty good (except for HEVC). The only things that Reddit would need to care about are file size and audio. It seems likely that Reddit would reject audio, or categorize videos that have it, so it could give fair warning.