It is designed to be offline first to cater to slow connections
YouTube has developed a new app YouTube Go – a video-streaming mobile platform designed to be “offline-first”.
According to its blog, users can save YouTube videos to their phones storage — internal storage or SD card — for offline viewing at a later time; users can also select the quality of the videos’ resolution, which will affect how much storage space they take up.
In addition, YouTube Go offer previews. Users can tap on a video’s thumbnail and trigger a short preview before choosing to stream or save the video. Each video thumbnail also displays the size of the videos.
There is also a social function where users can share and send videos to other YouTube Go users without consuming data.
Apart from that, the app offers the basic YouTube community features such as the ability to find and discover related videos such as trending videos in the user’s region.
YouTube Go will be rolled out in India first, where many are still dependent on 2G connections.
3G connection adoptions in the country remain low — the number of Indian 3G users are between 11 per cent to 15 per cent, according to the Times of India.
This poses a huge problem for a population fond of watching Bollywood hits on mobile (nearly 30 per cent of Indians use a smartphone): a 2G connection transmits 0.3 MBit/s, while 3G transmits up to 42 Mbits, and YouTube videos require a minimum of 0.5 Mbit/s to stream.
To be informed when YouTube Go launches, sign up for the notification here.
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YouTube
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