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Google Permits India To Download YouTube Content Overnight (thestack.com)

Posted by EditorDavid on from the check-out-this-video dept.

An anonymous reader writes: Google India has announced that users of the YouTube app in India can now download content during cheaper night-time connectivity periods for offline viewing later. Downloaded videos can be viewed for up to 30 days... Streaming providers are currently conflicted between the low-risk policy of denying offline viewing, and the risk of alienating the lesser-connected markets where they're keen to grab an early foothold. In late 2014 a Netflix executive said offline viewing was "never going to happen", but in April of this year CEO Reed Hastings backtracked in a letter to shareholders, commenting "as we expand around the world, where we see an uneven set of networks, it's something we should keep an open mind about."

33 comments

  1. youtube-dl anyone? by evanh · · Score: 2

    Scripting sucks anyway.

    1. Re: youtube-dl anyone? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      As if most people know how to run a command line program.

    2. Re: youtube-dl anyone? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      There are extensions to Firefox that make downloading youtube videos trivial, and on Android one can the open-source Newpipe app on the F-droid app repository also makes downloading videos easy. So the cat is already out of the bag.

    3. Re: youtube-dl anyone? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Nerds shooting themselves in the foot, again. No news at eleven, because everybody has already seen that a thousand times. Folks, the one thing that the people stealing your money in the stock market do not do? Blab like an excited six year old. The people who hear about the huge rent-controlled apartment in the nice location, which would have been perfect for you? Tell you about it AFTER they've signed the lease. See the pattern?

    4. Re:youtube-dl anyone? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It's understandable that is not for most people, but that is how I have automated my feeds queue for hundreds of channels.
      Or for direct viewing click and drag url to VLC, rarely watch any videos via web, that is crazy and a waste of time and resources better spent watching more cool videos!

    5. Re: youtube-dl anyone? by gaiageek · · Score: 1

      Yes there were ways to do this already, but most people, especially in rural areas of a developing country, are simply not aware of such options, much less how to implement them.

      --
      www.gaiageek.com
    6. Re: youtube-dl anyone? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      IME they're far more aware than people in developed nations. Necessity is the mother of invention.

    7. Re: youtube-dl anyone? by _KiTA_ · · Score: 1

      Yes there were ways to do this already, but most people, especially in rural areas of a developing country, are simply not aware of such options, much less how to implement them.

      More importantly this gives Google's legal team ammunition to shut down those other ways.

      "We implemented a way for poor dirt farmers in India to download vids at night for watching in the morning, so your download service no longer has a legit purpose."

  2. This is an efficiency issue by mysidia · · Score: 4, Interesting

    It would be much more efficient for everyone for Netflix to work relatively well under poor network connections.

    I suggest allowing end devices to download Divided and Encrypted content which could be played offline, except the player needs a key stream and a low-bandwidth stream with rest of info to reassemble video....

    Then instead of streaming video in real-time from Netflix servers.... stream information required to decrypt in realtime at less than 1 Kilobit per second.

    Should be possible to accommodate low-bandwidth connections, by allowing pre-downloads and low bandwidth streaming.

    Also, the encrypted and reduced feed ought to be cachea-ble by proxy servers, and distributed through CDNs.

    Also, they should make appliances you can put in your LAN that have say a 4TB hard drive and will simply download the entire library over a long period of time (But you will still need a Netflix account to stream them, Because the Encrypted blobs are just the bulk of the data, not 100% of what's necessary to play the content).

    1. Re:This is an efficiency issue by hjf · · Score: 3, Informative

      This would apply to Netflix, yes. But after years of supporting tiny Wireless ISPs in rural north-east Argentina, where you can get a 4MBIT (that is correct) connection for $100 to $200 per megabit (yes, that's $400-$800 a month for 4 mbit/s), i can tell you two things:

      1. 80% of traffic is Youtube (measured myself)
      2. Google goes above and beyond to make youtube uncacheable. There were some solutions (Thundercache, a set of scripts for Squid developed by a sleazy brazilian company that will license this by either a paid subscription or ad injection) that required constant tuning and updating. The final blow was moving everything to HTTPS which made all google and facebook services uncacheable.

      I don't know why Google does this, though. They also don't make it easy for smaller ISPs to host Youtube cache boxes (they do for very, very large ones only).

    2. Re:This is an efficiency issue by swb · · Score: 2

      I don't know what the breakdown of Netflix viewership is by device type, but I wonder if an offline caching scheme isn't limited by the fact that so many devices used to access it have little or no caching capability anyway.

      It'd be highly PC specific code and the resultant security arms race to prevent it from being ripped. I'd wager that there's probably a good enough encryption threshold that would stop 98% of people from doing it, though, which ought to be adequate.

      You would have thought that on devices with more secure storage, like an iPad, that they would have considered enabling it.

    3. Re:This is an efficiency issue by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      DRM is broken by design.
      It doesnt matter how much you encrypt or divide something, if you can (at some point in time) view it on the client, you cannot prevent it from being put together and decrypted and concatenated into one file.

      Therefore they all try not to download anything to your client, as that would make ripping much easier.

      Sucks that it implies that slow networks dont get the content... but thats the downside of accepting and playing by the idiotic rules set by the content mafia like MPAA RIAA and others.

    4. Re:This is an efficiency issue by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I don't know why Google does this, though.

      Really, you don't know? Google doesn't want you "off the rez" so to speak. Every click, every hit, every keystroke has to go back to a Google server somewhere. If you distribute that out, you probably somehow lose some kind of tracking ability, and that just can't happen.

    5. Re:This is an efficiency issue by hjf · · Score: 1

      Yes, I understand interactions, sure. But bulk, raw data content streams? Why?

    6. Re: This is an efficiency issue by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Believe it or not, https is faster than http on many networks these days because of caches 'helping'.

      You could probably just ask YouTube to put a cache in your network, btw.

    7. Re:This is an efficiency issue by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I don't know why Google does this, though.

      read this

        http://cloudsession.com/dawg/downloads/misc/kag-draft-2k121024.pdf

    8. Re:This is an efficiency issue by Darinbob · · Score: 1

      I always thought that the DVR was still valid even for streaming. Except for entitle people who whine when they don't get unlimited bandwidth, most of the world will either have varying amounts of connectivity, or have peak periods that cost more, or other reasons to make the time of viewing different from the time of downloading. At the very least it spreads out the internet traffic over the day instead of having most of it during the evening television viewing hours. However content companies do not like this, the ability to download and then watch later at your own convenience is the equivalent of piracy to them.

    9. Re:This is an efficiency issue by Darinbob · · Score: 1

      Or a DVR type device would work too, so it's usable on your TV.

    10. Re: This is an efficiency issue by hjf · · Score: 1

      Ah yes, youtube has this toll free number where you can call them and speak to a support person. Come on. There is no way to contact google if you expect an actual response.

    11. Re:This is an efficiency issue by crschmidt · · Score: 2
      Hi,

      Google's GGC program -- our in-ISP caching program, more info at https://peering.google.com/#/o... -- is targeted at ISPs with > 1Gbps of cachable end-user traffic. This is simply a matter of practicality: there are tens of thousands of ISPs in the world, and in cases with 1Gbps of traffic, there simply isn't enough value to deploy in an ISP network. ("Our edge node offering was designed for end-user networks with greater than 1Gbps of peak Google traffic. Google encourages networks with less than 1Gbps peak traffic to Google to join a local Internet Exchange or peer directly with us." -- Google Peering FAQ). If you are an ISP smaller than that, you're right that you'll have some difficulty getting access to in-ISP caching.

      If you have more usage than that, and have not been able to get a response to an expressed interest via the GGC page, I'm happy to take your information and try and see why that is. I'll admit that I know less about South American GGC deployments than I do about other parts of the world, simply because I tend to work less often with folks who work on that part of the problem, so it's possible that there's more to it than I'm aware of. You can email me at crschmidt@google.com; if you do, please include your ASN number.

      I think that there is a known need for the ability to scale caches down to smaller sizes -- e.g. to make it cost effective to deliver more caches to smaller ISPs. I don't have anything to say, but I will say that I think that we are aware that this is a gap in our coverage, and we don't like it any more than you do.

      As for making it "difficult to cache" -- I'm not sure exactly what you mean, but generally speaking, there's two things I can think of:
      • We use SSL for video streams. Protecting users is the most important thing we can do at Google, and without SSL, bad actors were able to use unencrypted YouTube streams as a source of invading the privacy of our users ( U.S. firm helped the spyware industry build a potent digital weapon for sale overseas). Obviously this isn't the only reason to go SSL, but non-SSL communications simply aren't an option in the modern internet anymore.
      • We use signed URLs with relatively short expiry. This is to largely to protect the CDN from abuse.

      Neither of these is *targeted* at cache-busting, but both have that effect; with the GGC program in place, we don't make it a primary goal to make the raw streams cachable, because we simply don't wish to have ISPs do caching that way, and instead prefer GGCs, which give better user performance where we can use them.

      In any case, if you are having trouble finding someone to talk to, please feel free to let me know, and I'll see what I can do, if anything.

      -- Christopher Schmidt, YouTube Quality of Experience

      --
      -- Christopher Schmidt YouTube Quality of Experience
  3. What's even the point? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Here's a complete list of all the Netflix Original Content that has been protected by these measures that you CAN'T download off a torrent right now:

  4. This makes so much sense for developing countries by gaiageek · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Outside of urban areas in many developing countries (India being a great example), internet speeds can slow to a crawl during waking hours as everyone is doing their online thing and traffic is going through a single connection from that town or village, often through a repeater to a repeater to a repeater that might get you 1.0 Mbps when congestion isn't an issue (during the middle of the night).

    Given that video takes huge bandwidth, and YouTube is the single largest provider of free video content, this tactic is actually long overdue. Not only will it make people's YouTube experience more pleasant, but it will also likely make the internet experience of everyone in that village/town/region/country much less frustrating.

    --
    www.gaiageek.com
  5. Mobile/satellite plans by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I live in america and I already do this.
    If you're on a metered connection you can pretty much forget about watching HD videos of any significant length without blowing the data cap halfway through the month.
    Off-peak hours are metered separately for me, so I just save long videos then and watch them later.

  6. All of Youtube? Overnight? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Where does one find enough hard drives for cheap to store that many cat videos?

  7. Netflix *can't* do it by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Here's the thing. Netflix has gotten in bed with content providers so deep it's willing to trash a portion of its userbase just to keep the content providers happy (banning VPNs and DNS services that let you change countries, heck, even banning VPNs used just for privacy reasons terminating in the same country).

    I'm a Canadian that visits the US quite often (a lot of Canadians do). If Netflix let me store content for later viewing, you can bet your ass I'm going to download every single item not allowed for viewing in Canada while I'm in the US and bring it all back with me. Content providers aren't dumb, they know that will happen, and they'll handcuff Netflix again.

    I appreciate that Netflix is trying to break out of this cage by creating its own content, but I think a better bet for them would be to go to the providers and tell them they're bringing down all the borders. Let the chips fall where they may. Netflix could lower their prices considering how much content they'll no longer be permitted to pay for. Let the content providers enjoy making no money.

  8. Did they not JUST C&D someone over this? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Hypocrisy at its finest.

  9. Re:This makes so much sense for developing countri by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    In the U.S., outside of areas of high income and actual broadband (by FCC definition) affordability, the same conditions apply. Yes, if you can afford (and put up with) Com**** and its cable TV industry equivalents, you can probably get a nominal 25 mb/s download - when everybody else in the neighborhood is out of town or asleep. Uverse/DSL or its equivalents from other phone providers can't provide more than 1-2 (sometimes 3) mb/s when other people are awake in the region, regardless of how much you pay for, and the cost isn't much less than for Com****. Plus, regardless of what has been said here in other articles, monthly data caps remain at 300-350 GB. Both providers make extreme efforts to hide actual pricing (including incomplete promotional prices that don't disclose equipment, installation, and myriad other extra charges), and policies like the data cap/overage cost, in their promotional materials.Yes, I've been doing some research lately. That might sound like heaven to rural India (or even rural California where cell phone or satellite are the only options), but it is simply abusive in a first-world country.

    It *would* be useful, even in a U.S. suburban area (let alone rural area, many of which approach Indian levels of access), to be able to locally cache Netflix, Hulu, and longer Youtube programs overnight; a reasonable limit on watching time (even just a couple of weeks) would be fine. At least then the unreliable phone-based service or the traffic-impacted cable service should be less-loaded and able to complete the task. For rural areas, it would be very useful to have things not only cacheable, but splittable, so for instance a show could be downloaded at the end of the ISP billing period with part of the download in this period and part in the next.

  10. Tor + youtube-dl by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    torsocks ./youtube-dl --user-agent "putauseragenthere" urltovideoorpagewithvideohere

    after verifying the youtube-dl sig

    assuming you're using Tails with includes torsocks.

    IIRC it will automatically choose the best quality video with the above command, and go through the Tor network.

  11. Wasnt this banned by the Indian telecom authority? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    AFAIK, they had banned such discriminatory tariffs, right?

  12. Netflix backtrack by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    They changed "never going to happen" to mean "never going to happen in the US", which could change to "will happen in the US as soon as capping limits are suspended during the night" - because, you know, a developed country like the US just doesn't have the ability to provide decent Internet at decent prices (or even at indecent prices for that matter, given all the new capping that I'm reading about)