Safari Autoplay embedded video | iOS 4.2.1

Question

It seems that Apple in it's wisdom have plugged up all of the workarounds to autoplay an embedded video within Safari and completely locked it down. While I understand there could be issues of uninitiated content over 3G there may be situations where the user has consented to the content before they've reached the page. It would be a better idea to have this as a user option in Safari settings. In any case I could link directly to an mp4 file and it will autoplay so it kind of defeats Apple's reasoning.

Answer 1

Apple is playing games here. There have been work-arounds for the autoplay issue that worked with earlier versions of iOS and have since been "cleaned up" by Apple. This shows that having this feature available threatens some position of theirs, in the grand scheme of things. It takes effort to write-out as it does to write-in.
So why not have a opt-in system for video auto play. Similar, in operation and "location" within the settings interface of iOS, to the "Fetch new Data" dialogue. This would take care of the posited argument of "mobile users being hit by unwarranted band-with charges due to video autoplay". This is exactly what is being addressed by "Fetch new Data" settings.
The only reason I can logically think of here with all of the info I've been able to glean on the subject is that video autoplay is the only arguable point within the whole HTML5-CSS-JS framework that can keep the iOS App at any form of advantage, by Apple excluding its functionality in mobile Safari.