Support for fullscreen in iPhone iOS10+ with inline playback with IMA HTML5 SDK release 3.354.0

[Arnaud Leyder]

Hi,

As stated in https://developers.google.com/interactive-media-ads/docs/sdks/html5/v3/history with release 3.354.0:

|| Added support for skippable ads on iOS 10+ mobile web when using the default iOS video player. Skippables are not supported when using custom video players.

My undertsanding is that since that release, the new implementation with IMA SDK in iPhone iOS10+ with inline playback is to force the use of Custom Playback (e.g. 2 different overlay video players are used). While this is great because it allows for skippable ads to be made widely available in iPhone iOS10+ this leaves us with a broken fullscreen implementation and no mean to go back to using the same HTML5 video player for ads and content in our player (note this only applies to iPhone, we have everything working on iPad with iOS or iPad with iPadOS since that release). 

I would like to know if this is still possible to not use Custom Playback (at the cost of no skippable ads support) for iPhone iOS10+ with inline playback or if we should just assume that this is the new standard and work on finding ways to work around the lack of fullscreen support for iPhone iOS10+ with inline playback while using IMA ads. 

Thanks

Arnaud

[IMA SDK]

Hi,

Thank you for reaching out to us. The v3.354.0 release doesn't change much in the IMA SDK for HTML5 functioning on iOS mobile web. The  release v3.354.0 was to fix an issue that AdSense-For-Games publishers were facing. Non-Adsense-For-Games publishers still have to choose between support for skippable ads and support for full-screen. We would recommend you to take a look at our blog post as it provides more details on the subject.

Regards,
Arnaud Casame
IMA SDK Team

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[Arnaud Leyder]

I am going to clarify the issue that we are having. 

We are using webkitEnterFullscreen (https://developer.apple.com/documentation/webkitjs/htmlvideoelement/1633500-webkitenterfullscreen) to manage fullscreen in iOS. This is coupled with playsinline attribute on video tag. What we are seeing is that since recently the IMA player is using 2 separated players for ads on iOS, where in the past it used only one player (our player). This happens for both skippable AND non-skippable ads. As such we are no longer able to provide fullscreen feature to our viewers because with that implementation, that used to work without issue, the Google IMA SDK now always behave like setDisableCustomPlaybackForIOS10Plus is set to true. This is the issue I am reporting. I believe this is a new behaviour from the IMA SDK as we have not made any changes to our IMA SDK implementation that could cause this behaviour. In your example at https://github.com/googleads/googleads-ima-html5/releases/tag/2.15 in the advanced folder you are bypassing this issue by using a full window mode for iOS (e.g. you are not using the native fullscreen for iOS through webkitEnterFullscreen). I would like to know if it is possible to put back on the past behaviour while using our implementation or should we adjust to using a full window approach instead of native fullscreen for iOS (as this no longer works for both skippable AND non-skippable ads).

Thanks

Arnaud

[IMA SDK]

Hi Arnaud,

Allow me to share the behavior you reported with the rest of the team. We are going to review it and I'll get back to this thread as soon as I have more information.

Regards,
Arnaud Casame
IMA SDK Team

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[Edward Tan]

Hey, just wanted to ask if there was any followup to this?

[IMA SDK]

Hi Edward,

A fix for this issue has been released since January 2020, this feature should work fine by now.