Documentation

Working With Facebook Instant Articles

Scope of support

Facebook recently introduced a dedicated format for news publishers called Instant Articles. Those Instant Articles can be consumed directly inside Facebook mobile application on Android and iOS. This new format aims at offering a better user experience than "classic" mobile web articles thanks to faster page load and pre-defined content types. This is similar in concept to Google AMP. Those articles are rendered in a WebView managed by Facebook application. This WebView is different from Facebook in-app browser and has some limitations, especially on iOS, when it comes to displaying media content.

On Android we can use an iframe embed to display Radiant Media Player and our testing shows that it works well even for advanced features like video ads. We do support using video ads in an iOS or Android Facebook Instant Articles WebView, however it should be noted that since the HTML5 Google IMA SDK is not officially supported in an iOS or Android WebView, the preferred solution is to use our VAST parser rmp-vast. However if you are using Google Ads (Google Ad Manager, AdSense for Video) we still recommend using the IMA SDK even in an OS or Android WebView. See this section for more information on using the IMA SDK in a WebView

On iOS, Facebook Instant Articles are also rendered in a WebView and we can also use iframe embedding to display our player. However in Facebook Instant Articles for iOS, inline playback of HTML5 video is not allowed. Video, including video ads, will be rendered in the iOS default fullscreen player.

Usage example

To embed Radiant Media Player in Facebook Instant Articles for Android or iOS we will use iframe embedding.

You can find a complete example of well-formed example article here. Please view source on this page to understand the markup. Essentially our player consists of:

<figure class="op-interactive">
  <iframe width="480" height="270" title="Video content" src="https://www.radiantmediaplayer.com/docs/latest/gist/iframe/iframe-fbia.html"></iframe>
</figure>
Except as otherwise noted, the content of this page is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

©2015-2024 Radiant Media Player. All Rights Reserved.