Tag: youtube

Youtube ‘Offline’ is now available in India

YouTube has launched the offline feature that allows users to download videos to their Android or iOS device for offline viewing without internet connectivity in India.

Users will have to sync with YouTube to watch the videos. The downloaded content will be available for offline playback only via the YouTube app. YouTube stated that, “much of India’s popular YouTube content” is available to view offline.

John Harding, Vice President of Engineering at YouTube, “In a country like India, the future of the Internet is mobile… By launching this offline experience on YouTube in India today, we hope to help people move past the challenges of data connection, speed and cost to enjoy a smooth, buffer-free version of YouTube.”

For videos where this feature is available, you can choose to add the video for offline viewing by tapping on the offline icon. The videos will be available for viewing for 48 hours only, to help avoid issues involved with free downloading of copyrighted content.

Along with India this feature is launched for the users in Indonesia and the Philippines too.

Dec 11, 2014
Google will allow users to download and watch YouTube videos offline in India

After Android One, India will have another first from Google as the tech giant plans to make YouTube available offline, allowing people to save on download charges for watching their favorite videos.

YouTube executive Ceasar Sengupta mentioned at the launch event that the move was to better serve users in the country, where a consistent cellular data connection is not always available.

YouTube is popular here. You watch some videos again and again. How awesome would it be if you could keep watching them again and again without having to pay for data, and take the videos with you wherever you go? Within the coming few weeks, much of YouTube will be available offline in India. This is huge, and our users will really, really like this. You can download a video once, save it to your phone, and watch it again and again.

It is not clear at the moment whether this new offline feature is restricted to India, or if this will be an Android only feature. The demand for video on mobile has been around for a while – some telecom providers have experimented with YouTube focused data packs, which let you stream videos at a discounted data rate.

Reports suggest that 3.7 billion online videos are consumed per month in the country. According to comScore, the total online video audience in India saw growth of over 70 percent in 2013 with the average viewer watching 18 percent more videos and spending 28 percent more time viewing.

The service will not be restricted to music videos, and users will have the ability to download any video off the service and store it offline.

Sep 15, 2014
Firefox: How to get playback speed options in YouTube?

Recently I was asked a question on Quora –

Why does the option to play YouTube videos at 2x speed appear in Chrome and not Firefox?

So I started to investigate the reasons why didn’t such an option exist while playing YouTube videos in Firefox.

Soon I came to the conclusion that it was just because of the difference in HTML5 developement on part of Firefox and Chrome.

Opera and Firefox do not include H.264 video support in their HTML5 implementation. They are throwing their support in for Ogg Theora. Youtube currently does not have Ogg Theora encoded videos, and may never. Apple is backing H.264 to be the standard for HTML5 video, and Google is backing both.

So here’s how you can get the playback speed options while playing YouTube videos in Firefox

Go to YouTube/html5 and “Request the HTML5 player.”

This should help you change the playback speed for most of the supported videos!

Jul 20, 2014
Welcome the Whyd’s new streaming App That Saves Songs from across the Web

The new music start up just launched its social music streaming iOS app. This app provides a centralized music streaming service by pulling songs from other platforms around the web. Providing its users to play and share nearly any song almost instantly.

The app functions similarly like the company’s web-based social streaming service which is first launched in 2012. Allowing users to collect and share songs culled from other streaming services, including SoundCloud, Vimeo, YouTube and Spotify without leaving the app.

“The significance might be lost on some people, who just assume that everything should also come in app form,” the company wrote in a blog spot.

After creating a profile the app search for individual songs or playlists created by other users. You can simply stream songs individually or collect tracks into playlists of your own, which get shared on your profile. In this app tracks load surprisingly quickly. Most search results come from more indie-centric sources like Soundcloud and music blogs, meaning that even more obscure tracks are easy to find.

After making the web version of its service available to the public after an extended closed beta the Paris-based start up raised $700,000 in funding.

Whyd claims it is already working on an Android app, but Windows Phone users “might have to wait a little bit longer.”

Jun 24, 2014