Basically everyone knows what YouTube is. Many people use it on a daily basis, me included. You can really find all sorts of content on this Google owned video service and it just keeps on growing. Google has been teasing its offline video watching feature on its mobile apps for a long time now, but it didn’t happen just yet. That might change soon though, if you visit YouTube application page on Google Play Store (or just look below this article) and take a closer look at the screenshots there, navigation menu rather, you’ll notice a listing dubbed “Offline”.
If this feature comes to life it will probably work a bit differently than you might think. You probably won’t be able to download videos or anything of the sort, it’s against YouTube’s Terms of Service after all, the app might cache it for you though. This seems like a logical solution and Google’s probably going to take that route. It would be nice to have detailed options to set in which case you want to cache your videos, for example if you’re on a Wi-Fi network or if your videos are in a certain caching folder or something. YouTube actually had something like this a while ago, there was an option within the app which let you preload videos, though it didn’t work very well, at least in my experience. As a somewhat non-related side note, YouTube’s long-awaited subscription service has been put on hold (again) recently.
We might see this “offline” option within YouTube app soon considering they decided to put up screenshots containing it on the Google Play Store. Would you find this option useful yourself if it would work as we’re guessing it will?
