Google Permits India To Download YouTube Content Overnight (thestack.com) 33
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."
youtube-dl anyone? (Score:3)
Scripting sucks anyway.
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Yes there were ways to do this already, but most people, especially in rural areas of a developing country, are simply not aware of such options, much less how to implement them.
More importantly this gives Google's legal team ammunition to shut down those other ways.
"We implemented a way for poor dirt farmers in India to download vids at night for watching in the morning, so your download service no longer has a legit purpose."
This is an efficiency issue (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:4, Informative)
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).
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Yes, I understand interactions, sure. But bulk, raw data content streams? Why?
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Ah yes, youtube has this toll free number where you can call them and speak to a support person. Come on. There is no way to contact google if you expect an actual response.
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Google's GGC program -- our in-ISP caching program, more info at https://peering.google.com/#/o... [google.com] -- 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
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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
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Or a DVR type device would work too, so it's usable on your TV.
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I always thought that the DVR was still valid even for streaming. Except for entitle people who whine when they don't get unlimited bandwidth, most of the world will either have varying amounts of connectivity, or have peak periods that cost more, or other reasons to make the time of viewing different from the time of downloading. At the very least it spreads out the internet traffic over the day instead of having most of it during the evening television viewing hours. However content companies do not li
This makes so much sense for developing countries (Score:5, Insightful)
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.