Videos are a key pillar in many of our customers' content offerings, and Pugpig Bolt has a broad range of tools to help you leverage this. This document explains how video in Bolt works, what options you have and what functionality you'll have access to.

It's important to start with the fact that Bolt supports a number of different video players, the full list is available here and includes most of the most popular players used by publishers. If you use a video provider not on that list, we're usually able to integrate it as part of your project. 

Technology 

The underlying iOS and Android platforms differ substantially in how video is supported, and this manifests itself in a few, generally minor ways. 

On Bolt iOS video playback is handled mostly by iOS itself. While the video player the user will see in an article or on the timeline is part of the page's HTML, once a video starts playing this is handled by native code on the device. This ensures that the playback is crisp, responsive to your exact device and enables some other platform-provided features, such as picture-in-picture, including when the app is in the background.

Android differs in that the operating system is more hands-off in terms of video rendering. This means that web players are used to display natively-rendered video and handle functionality like full-screen playback and orientation. This does mean that there can be greater variance in the video experience depending on which video platform is being used. 

Upcoming changes

In future versions of Bolt we plan to add support for

1. Background video playback (iOS and Android): This will allow you to continue listening to the audio of a video when you've left the app or locked your device.
2. Picture-in-picture (Android): This allows videos to continue playing in a small window while you navigate elsewhere in the app or even to to other apps on your device.