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

youtube-dl anyone?

[evanh]

Scripting sucks anyway.

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).

Re:This is an efficiency issue

[hjf]

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).

Re:This is an efficiency issue

[swb]

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.

Re:This is an efficiency issue

[crschmidt]

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

This makes so much sense for developing countries

[gaiageek]

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.