UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_14_0) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/70.0.3538.110 Safari/537.36

Example URL:

Steps to reproduce the problem:
1.open a (youtube) video in a new background tab
2. video will not autoplay

What is the expected behavior?
old versions of chrome had a --disable-gesture-requirement-for-media-playback flag that, once enabled, would allow background tabs to autoplay without any interaction to the tab

What went wrong?
goodness, we have all been asking for this for so long it's difficult to track down when this broke. the --disable-gesture-requirement-for-media-playback flag was removed and replaced with the new autoplay-policy flag that does not behave the same as the old flag used to. 

Did this work before? Yes 

Is it a problem with Flash or HTML5? Both

Does this work in other browsers? Yes

Chrome version: 70.0.3538.110  Channel: n/a
OS Version: OS X 10.14.0
Flash Version: 

Contents of chrome://gpu: 

We understand that flags are not supported and are experimental features. However, background tabs used to autoplay without any interaction or flags, and we have ben asking for a way to re-enable  this original behavior since it's change 

Chromium developer mlamouri has specifically made it impossible for this request to see a resolution or a workaround, and has no motivation to handle this properly. We ask that a different developer be assigned to the case and you review the original  issue 728108  to prove to yourself there is more than sufficient evidence and user base requesting this ability. 

When the autoplay policy change was blog posted, HUNDREDS of users complained about the change with no control over the behavior and this was ignored.

original issue: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=728108

autoplay policy blog post with commenters complaining: https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2017/09/autoplay-policy-changes