Each lobby clip now has its own page
Since the new lobby went up, the start screen has played short flights recorded in the game: twelve seconds over Hamburg, Manhattan, London, Paris, Rio de Janeiro and Sydney. Until today they lived only there, in a small screen next to the menu.
Now each of them has a page of its own. The list is at /videos, and every clip opens at its own address, for example /videos/sydney or /videos/paris.
What is on a page
The video comes first, at the full width of the page, with the controls of your browser. On a computer it starts muted and loops; on a phone it waits for a tap, because a clip is about 1.3 MB of mobile data.
Under it you'll find what the flight passes (the Elbe and the port in Hamburg, the Great Lawn in Central Park, Westminster and the London Eye, the Champ de Mars, Corcovado, the Opera House and the Harbour Bridge), when the clip was recorded, its take-off point and the map data it was made from. Fly there opens the game at that point, so you can fly the same line yourself. Then come the other five clips, a short FAQ and links to the city pages and, for London and Paris, the drone races that run through the same streets.
Why separate pages
Search engines index a video only on a page where the video is the main thing. On the start screen it isn't: there the page is about the game, and the clip sits beside it. Google told us exactly that in Search Console, so the clips got pages where they are the main thing.
In the lobby itself nothing moves. The ⛶ button still goes full screen in place, and the caption under the clip ("Watch a flight") now links to the page of the clip that is playing.
About the picture
The cities in these clips are Google's photorealistic 3D tiles. Google allows short promotional videos of them only with its logo, the map data credits and the line "For promotional purposes only" in the picture, so all three are burned into every frame and repeated under the player. That's why the clips are never cropped or re-encoded for the pages.
The pages are in all twelve languages of the site. When we record a new place, it gets a slot on the start screen and a page here at the same time.