Over the past few days there have been speculation that YouTube is going to allow offline viewing In India, I.e YouTube will allow users to cache their data locally in their devices and view them offline even if they do not have an Internet connection. Media Nama seems it have confirmed this news.
This news holds particular significance at a time when Google's focus has been on India with the eventual announcement and launch of the' android one' series of smart phones that will have Google's direct blessings in getting first updates to Android.
Today, YouTube has almost become the defecto número uno in video consumption. By opening out its API, thousands of apps have connected to YouTube and offer users improved Youtube experiences than what the stock YouTube app provides. Some of them even offer an offline caching functionality, but typically, these apps are paid apps , costing 1 or 2 dollars. So, by introducing this offline feature for free ( some sources say 10 dollars a month ), what is Google trying to achieve?
Smart phone penetration has been immense in the last few years. While a few users can afford a smartphone, most users simply cannot afford 3G prices which even after normalisation have not fallen down. A few months ago, some operators dropped 3G prices to around rs.120 only to raise it again. ( The 3G unlimited plans are all gimmicks, that typically have a fair usage limits ). Airtel offers a 49 rs per GB plan after midnight, to encourage maximal utilisation of their network, but few would want to stay that late to get the benefit. More over, by that time, most people would be home, so they may as well use their Wifi connections which would be much more cheaper.
People do purchase 3G recharges for less bandwidth hungry applications like mail , or whatsapp or even for watching smaller videos, typically 10 or 20 MB in size. But, could most people in India afford to watch say a full movie in YouTube using 3G ? Let's do some simple math.
If you look up play.google.com/movies and search for the movie Thalaivaa, you can find a link that allows a user to rent the movie for rs.25.
If you look up the same name Thalaivaa on YouTube, you can see the same movie for free. At a decent resolution, say around 360p, the film size would be around 500-600 MB if watched from YouTube. If viewed from 3G, the movie would typically cost rs.100-120. Watching the movie in higher resolution would simply cost more. But in 2014, does paying a telecom operator rs.120 to watch a film when the content provider provides it for free, make any sense?
For Google, the logic is simple. The more people watch YouTube, the more money it makes. But Google has no way of influencing telecom networks to reduce costs any further. This is best possibly exemplified by Airtel which is a partner in the Android One program that magnanimously offers 200 MB free monthly for Android one users to update their apps. 200 MB per month. Is simply nothing but peanuts in 2014.
So, possibly by creating the possibility of allowing users to have offline access for YouTube, YouTube has the possibility to embed multiple advertisements even in an offline cached video thereby a user sees the video, he may have to see the advertisements.
So, what do you think is the reason behind Google announcing YouTube videos to be available for offline viewing in India?
