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

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."

Comments

This is an efficiency issue

[mysidia]

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).