To counter low bandwidth, costly data plans.
By The American Bazaar Staff
WASHINGTON, DC: The video sharing website YouTube has launched an offline viewing service in India to help users download videos they can watch later, to overcome handicaps posed by low bandwidth and high costs of data plans.
Under the service, which went live in India, Indonesia and the Philippines today, a user can click on the special icon on the site when she is either in a Wi-Fi zone or a place with good data connectivity, and download a video which can be watched later, reported Outlook.
The downloaded videos can be watched as many times within 48 hours and the advertiser’s interests have been protected through an innovation wherein the advertisement appears before a playback of the video, like it would for online usage.
The US-based internet advertising giant said a large number of videos are already available and the company is speaking to more content partners to opt for this service.
Once the device connects back to the internet, analytics around the number of times the video was watched will be transferred to the YouTube servers.
At present, YouTube has 60 million users in India, while on the content front, there are 10,000 Indian films, 20,000 TV shows and 2.5 lakh songs which are available online, the company said.
Fifty eight million of the approximately 300 million internet users are on the low-speed 2G networks, though, and a bulk of the new additions are on the mobile, which do not offer the same speed as broadband.
Already, 40 per cent of the traffic on YouTube comes from a mobile device, and hence, there is a need for some alternate solutions, YouTube’s vice president for engineering John Harding said, Outlook reported.