YouTube to allow videos to be saved Offline soon in India

Apart from the big Android One launch today in New Delhi, Google’s Sundar Pichai had another big news for India too. Imagine watching the same video on YouTube again and again but without paying any data usage charges. Google announced that YouTube will be available offline in India in the coming weeks. Users will be able to download videos in the YouTube app and can watch later without any network connection. This is useful for both times when your connection is poor, and also for when you want to re-watch favourite videos. 

YouTube is popular here. You watch some videos again and again. How awesome would it be if you could keep watching them again and again without having to pay for data, and take the videos with you wherever you go? Within the coming few weeks, much of YouTube will be available offline in India. This is huge, and our users will really, really like this. You can download a video once, save it to your phone, and watch it again and again.           -Sundar Pichai 

The service will not be restricted to music videos, and users will have the ability to download any video off the service and store it offline. The demand for video on mobile has been around for a while - some telecom providers have experimented with YouTube focused data packs, which let you stream videos at a discounted data rate. Reports suggest that 3.7 billion online videos are consumed per month in the country. According to comScore, the total online video audience in India saw growth of over 70 percent in 2013 with the average viewer watching 18 percent more videos and spending 28 percent more time viewing. So it’s definitely a promising move by Google. 

YouTube app which in coming days might see a new option to save a video offline for users in India

Google did not mention as to when offline availability will launch in the country, nor has it stated whether the service will be available in other countries. There may be many challenges about some uploaders not wanting their videos to be downloadable but those are the challenges for Google to meet. As far as consumers are concerned, we have to say that this is good news even with the limited information available right now.