TL;DR
When using a third-party player, please ensure that you do not have autoplay in your HTML5 player and preload="none" is also set.
Using our awesome Captivate player is super, super, simple and it guarantees you're hitting all the right standards and ensuring that your downloads are IAB compliant.
Let’s get our geek on...
Oh, and it has a ton of features that we’d hate you to miss out on, including in-built calls to action!
The vast majority of podcasters use our amazing player every day and if you have any questions, you can view this guide here to embed any of your episodes on your website 😊
However if you do want to use your own third-party web player player for your Captivate hosted shows, you simply need to follow these guidelines to make sure your downloads remain IAB compliant.
Autoplaying Audio
Picture this, you get to the website of your fave podcast and WHAM you're hit with tons of audio that you haven't clicked on, you're getting all this information without asking for it and let's be honest, you wanted the choice to click the episode that you wanted to listen to, right?
The IAB specification states that this attribute has got to be disabled on any of the HTML5 players that your audio is linked to, that way your downloads show a true reflection of the actual people that have pro-actively gone on to click play on your episode or hit the download button - which in turn is a truer reflection of your audience.
The good news is that our Captivate player and the free Captivate Sites podcast website that comes with with each of your shows automatically disables this feature but of course if you're using your own third-party player, this DOES need to be disabled.
Preloading
Another feature in HTML5 players which is fairly similar to the above is the "preload" feature. This sets when the media will actually be downloaded on the page and in any other use case would ensure that the file is ready to play instantly by preloading the audio file and downloading to your device a small chunk of the file.
Luckily we're now in a world where we now don't have to disconnect the phone line to get our dial-up internet working (sorry Mum), in fact most people have very adequate download speeds.
Combine that with the fact that we use a proven and known CDN host, StackPath which has servers across the globe ensuring that your episodes are downloaded to your listeners’ devices almost instantly, this means that preloading the audio files isn't actually needed.
IAB specification also states that this has also got to be disabled, again we don't want to inflate our audience by mistake by including people that have just visited the website without playing any episodes, do we?
Of course we don’t. 😊
So if you're using your own third-party embeddable podcast player, let's ensure that "preload" is disabled too.
It’s a wrap
If you don't want to mess around with any of the above, or if any of this sounds like some lost, ancient language reserved for those coming through the Stargate, just use the awesome embeddable Captivate player.
We've got you covered.
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