Like Google, YouTube also holds a (kind-of) monopolistic position among video-sharing websites. They have been taking regular initiatives in cutting down the amount of cellular data that gets used over smartphones especially for developing countries like India, Philippines, Indonesia and more.
One of my friend had a knack of dwelling onto YouTube and Wynk Music on his way to and back from office, as a result his phone bills were never less than 2000 INR. In short, watching videos on your cellular data could be really really expensive.
Few months back, Offline Videos got introduced which allowed users to download the video while they are on high-bandwidth WiFi broadband connection and then watch them later. Few weeks later, this got further improved to Smart Offline, using which users could select the videos to download and schedule the downloading at off-peak hours.
These developments definitely helped us to watch more videos but solution to this problem was always to reduce the size of those videos. Working along the same lines, YouTube has launched a new Android app YouTube Go, which will be introduced initially in India only.
As YouTube has mentioned in its press-release that had a team of engineers, designers and research for collection ideas and conducting extensive research in 15 cities and all this hard-word will be seen in the new features that makes it highly personalized for Indian audience.
What makes it different from the existing YouTube App?
Find Relevant or Relatable Videos – With YouTube Go you will be able to search for videos, even if you are not connected to the internet. Moreover, the videos on your home-screen will include suggestions from your community.
Video Previews – Now before actually starting the video you will be able to go through its preview. This will look like a GIF Image running through some of the popular scenes of that videos. This undoubtedly saves lots of time, data and hence money. The GIF posted below shows this feature.
Choose Resolution – This app will also have the option to save the videos but this time you will be able to choose the resolution in which it will be saved. Apart from that, it will also show the free space left in drive before you actually start downloading it.
Sharing Video – I don’t remember when was the last time I used Bluetooth to transfer any file over any other phone. However, while travelling if I had to tell people around me regarding a nice video, I would not mind sharing it via bluetooth. Data Saving for all around us.
These are the four major changes in this new YouTube Go application which makes it really economical for users to watch a lot more on the same data pack. This is also a great news for all the YouTube publishers as it will probably add lot more of views to their videos from rural parts of the country.
