Omitting the "controls" flag should render the video tag control-less, however a temporary bug or not, the flag is completely ignored at iphone/ipod devices, the controls are also meaningless, as the video always plays in full-screen, you are left with a huge chunk of space, whose only purpose is to suck all the click and touch events like a black hole
The behavior is documented here: https://developer.apple.com/library/safari/documentation/AudioVideo/Conceptual/Using_HTML5_Audio_Video/Device-SpecificConsiderations/Device-SpecificConsiderations.html
The solution is to set the video tag's width/height to 1/1 - position it with "fixed" to -10,-10 and manually trigger "play" with a replacement UI instead of an actual video
This way the absurdities of the video tag are gone and since it always plays in fullscreen, the functionality is the same