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YouTube now allows offline video playback in 125 countries
- Youtube expands offline video playback to 125 countries.
- The feature is only available on mobile devices.
- Videos can be downloaded and watched without an internet connection for up to 48 hours.
The ability to download videos to watch offline is a feature that YouTube first introduced in 2014 to users in India and has been slowly spreading to other areas. However, the latest update seems to be by far the largest as it sees 125 countries get access to the download button.
You can see the full list of countries that now support the feature here. While the ability to download videos is no doubt super useful for when you have poor or no connectivity, there are still some restrictions on the feature.
For example, videos can only be downloaded using the mobile app, not on a computer. Videos will also only be available to watch for 48 hours unless you connect to the internet during that time. As well as this, some videos are completely unavailable for offline playback.
Luckily, downloading videos is very easy, you simply have to press the download button in the video’s context menu. Should you lose connection midway through a download, your progress will automatically resume when you reconnect to the internet.
YouTube Red, YouTube’s paid subscription service, is another service that has allowed offline viewing since its release in 2015. It is currently only available in the U.S., Australia, New Zealand, and South Korea and it is noticeable that none of these countries allow offline viewing on the free service.
Just two weeks ago, Youtube’s CEO Susan Wojcicki suggested that YouTube was finalizing deals that would get YouTube Red into “a hundred” countries by March 2018.