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Release 2.0.44

July - August, 2026​

The new release will include the upgrades, features, and issue fixes listed below:

  • Feature: Timed Links for Videos
    • Links can now be attached to specific moments of a video from the video's General Information tab. Each link has a title, a URL, and an optional duration — leave the duration empty and the link stays visible until the end of the video.

Mobile / Responsive​

  • Feature: Infinite Scroll for Content Lists
    • Videos, audios, podcasts, playlists, and recently deleted lists now keep loading as you scroll on mobile instead of paging through results. Lists are virtualised so scrolling stays smooth no matter how long the list gets.

Video Player · v2.7.0​

  • Feature: Timed Links

    • Videos can now carry timestamped clickable links that appear over the player at the times an editor chooses. One link shows at a time, each can have its own duration, and links stay hidden during ads. On small players the link collapses to an icon, and it moves to the opposite corner when the logo would overlap it. On livestreams only links with a time of 0 are shown.

  • Feature: Playback Health Reporting

    • Start attempts, fatal errors, and recoveries are now reported to a dedicated analytics endpoint, which powers the new playback error rate KPI. The player also fires each of them as a page event, so integrations can monitor stream health themselves.

  • Update: The player interface now scales for very large and 4K displays, with larger control icons and a taller control bar above 1920px wide.

  • Update: Playback failures on Safari and iOS are now detected directly from the video element, so a stream that breaks surfaces a clear error or recovers instead of sitting silent.

  • Update: A video that cannot be recovered now shows the error screen instead of leaving the viewer on a stuck "interrupted" screen.

  • FIX: Streams using CDN access tokens failed to play at all. Token values were being re-encoded, so every segment request was rejected.

  • FIX: A publisher's own Prebid build was ignored in favour of the default one, which meant the configured bidders never took part in the auction.

  • FIX: Per-bidder CPM adjustments overwrote each other, so only the last configured bidder kept its adjustment.

  • FIX: Ad preloading stopped permanently after one empty ad response, most visibly on iOS.

  • FIX: Old subtitle tracks were left behind on the video when subtitles were turned off or switched.

  • FIX: Analytics data was altered before it reached page listeners. Integrations now receive the values the player actually sent.

  • FIX: The video kept playing after the floating player was dismissed.

  • FIX: Videos whose publish date already ended in "Z" were rejected as invalid.

  • FIX: Replaying a finished video from the replay button did not reset playback tracking. A replay is now counted as a new view and its progress events fire again.

Video Player · v2.8.0​

  • Feature: Keyboard and Screen Reader Support

    • The player can now be operated entirely from the keyboard, and its controls describe themselves to screen readers. Tab reaches every control and reveals the control bar instead of being swallowed by it, the seekbar and volume control are exposed as sliders with a spoken position, the settings menu walks with arrow keys and closes with Escape, and the related-videos panel is a list of named buttons. A polite live region speaks buffering, recovery, caption toggles, quality changes and error screens without stealing focus.

  • Feature: Reduced Motion Support

    • Viewers who ask their system for reduced motion now get the player with decorative animation and transitions suppressed. The loading spinner keeps turning, so it still reads as working rather than stuck.

  • Feature: Translatable Assistive Text

    • Every string a screen reader speaks is now part of the language configuration, including text that never appears on screen, so a fully localised player is also localised for assistive technology.

  • Feature: Playlist Start Times

    • Each entry of a playlist can carry its own start time in seconds, and the player now honours it for every video in the playlist rather than only the first one.

  • Update: An accessibility conformance statement covering WCAG 2.2 Levels A and AA was added, as a vendor self-assessment with the known gaps listed.

  • Update: The seekbar now advances smoothly during on-demand playback instead of stepping forward a few times a second, and still snaps immediately on a seek, an ad, or a cast handoff. Livestreams keep their previous behaviour.

  • Update: Focus is now visible on every control, not only on the control-bar buttons, and focusing the volume control opens the slider.

  • Update: A player claims the keyboard shortcuts as soon as focus enters it, so a keyboard-only viewer no longer has to click the video first.

  • Update: A subtitle track that fails to load is now skipped and marked unavailable instead of taking the rest of the tracks down with it.

  • FIX: The second and later cast sessions of a page never resumed content after an ad, leaving the cast device stuck.

  • FIX: The player crashed when it auto-joined a cast session that was already running.

  • FIX: Disconnecting from a cast device rewound local playback to the start.

  • FIX: Per-bidder CPM adjustments were never applied when the bidders were configured on the video, which is the normal case.

  • FIX: Quartile and 20 second view events fired in a burst on any playback that started at a saved or configured position, before the viewer had watched anything.

  • FIX: The vp-before-complete event never fired again after the first playthrough.

  • FIX: Stream failover stacked up handlers, which caused repeated seeks and loading-screen flicker after several switches.

  • FIX: Converted SRT subtitles were never released, which grew memory over a long session or a long playlist.

  • FIX: A subtitle file that returns an error was attached as an empty track instead of being reported as failed.

  • FIX: A subtitle track with a missing file or label disabled subtitles for the whole video.

  • FIX: A timed overlay stayed hidden after seeking back into the window where it should show.

  • FIX: The player crashed when the space bar was held down as it was being destroyed.

  • FIX: A paywalled or registration-locked video showed the error screen and reloaded itself in the background instead of resting on its lock screen, and live players stayed stuck on the reconnect state after being unlocked.

  • FIX: View IDs repeated across views in search engine crawler renderers, which made tens of thousands of those views share a few hundred IDs.

Vertical Player · v1.7.0​

  • Feature: Timed Links

    • Timed links attached to a video now appear as timestamped link chips during playback, with auto-collapse and a slide-out overlay showing the full list.

  • Update: Swipe navigation is now enabled as soon as an ad becomes skippable.

  • Update: Smoother ambient background transitions.

  • FIX: Publish dates are now formatted correctly on Safari.

  • FIX: Resolved an issue where the dismiss button and extra bottom padding could appear in fullscreen.

Reporting impact

Four of the fixes above change numbers you may be watching on a dashboard. None of them is a regression — the previous numbers were wrong — but each will look like an anomaly on the deploy date, and historical rows are unchanged, so any comparison spanning that date compares two different populations.

  • Quartile and 20 second view counts step down by however much traffic resumes mid-video, and completion-rate ratios step up because their denominator was inflated.
  • Prebid CPM values shift by each bidder's configured adjustment, and auction winners can change with them.
  • Playback error counts and error rates step down on any site that uses paywall or registration locking, since a lock no longer reports a fatal error.
  • Distinct view counts step up wherever search engine crawlers render the page, since crawler views no longer collapse onto a handful of shared IDs.