Why doesn't video play in background on mobile?

The technology we use for these projects does not allow for moving background imagery to stream on mobile, mainly due to recommendations from Google - as streaming video for background imagery on mobile devices drastically slows down page speed load time and causes users to have a poor experience on mobile devices.

The most commonly used mobile solution is called a "Fallback image" which is the technology we use for this. This is where the website sees it's being called from a mobile device and it uses a speedier solution (just an image) to provide the best user experience. Another option is to completely hide the entire element.

We've seen a handful of sites that actually have moving backgrounds on mobile, as anything is possible with any budget, but to support moving background imagery on mobile, we'd need a significantly larger budget. And most of the sites we see on desktop that have moving backgrounds do NOT have them on mobile for these reasons.

So, given that it's not recommended by Google, and most sites we've seen that have moving backgrounds on desktop have an alternative solution on mobile, we've chosen a technology that suits this for all of our projects with this budget size.

Right now the best options are:

1. Use a fallback image
2. We can additionally hide elements on mobile only, like logo and button
3. We can hide the element altogether

Here are some sites we didn't design / develop that are using the same approach we are: http://artistview.com/ (see desktop; see mobile - FALLBACK IMAGE)
https://www.oasen.nl/ (video of guy running on desktop; see mobile - FALLBACK IMAGE)

Thanks for reading, and have a great day!

Paul Hickey, Founder / CEO / Lead Strategist at Data Driven Design, LLC has created and grown businesses via digital strategy and internet marketing for more than 10 years. His sweet spot is using analytics to design and build websites and grow the audience and revenue of businesses via SEO/Blogging, Google Adwords, Bing Ads, Facebook and Instagram Ads, Social Media Content Marketing and Email Marketing. The part that he’s most passionate about is quantifying next marketing actions based on real data.