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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."

1 of 33 comments (clear)

  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).