In the coming few weeks, much of YouTube is going to be available offline in India, said Caesar Sengupta, vice president, product management at Google in the capital on Monday. "It's a very common way to use YouTube. You find videos you like, you tend to watch them over and over again," he said at the launch of Android One in the capital.
A Google spokesperson says that the offline availability will be the content owner's prerogative. "It will be available by default. Content owners can decide if they want to opt into it," the spokesperson said, adding that views of the videos and ads will be kept track of offline as well.
Kanan Gill, who runs a YouTube series called Pretentious Movie Reviews along with fellow film reviewer Biswa Kalyan Rath, says that while the idea itself is "awesome", it is something that will need testing for content uploaders like him once made available. "It probably makes sense to have longer videos and podcasts made available offline so that people can watch it or listen to it at leisure," says Gill, who has nearly 85,000 subscribers to his YouTube channel.
Standup comedian Rohan Joshi, part of the group AIB that uploads humorous videos on YouTube regularly, says that if there is an accurate way to monitor views and ads, the new feature would work well. "There are a lot of internet connectivity issues in India. So that way, it is good, more people will watch these videos," says Joshi. AIB has over 6 lakh YouTube subscribers.
So far, web services like "keepvid" and "clipconverter" could be used to download YouTube videos on to a laptop or a desktop. However, the legality of using such services is questionable. In this case, a user would have the content owner's consent to have the video available on their device, offline.
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