Subscribe

YouTube takes things offline

Joanne Carew
By Joanne Carew, ITWeb Cape-based contributor.
Cape Town, 18 Nov 2015
Heather Thompson Rivera, YouTube's director and global head of product partnerships, says video is about more than entertainment.
Heather Thompson Rivera, YouTube's director and global head of product partnerships, says video is about more than entertainment.

YouTube's new offline feature aims to improve the user experience in regions with unreliable connectivity.

Speaking during the opening morning of AfricaCom 2015 in Cape Town yesterday, Heather Thompson Rivera, YouTube's director and global head ofproduct partnerships, announced the launch of the platform's offline functionality in Africa.

This feature aims to greatly improve the user experience. She outlined YouTube's desire for everyone to have the best quality experience. Users should be able to watch videos in high quality, with few delays and no buffering. But this is not a reality for many people in Africa and the developing world.

With YouTube offline, users no longer have to wait for content to buffer and load. The functionality allows people to take the video offline and watch it for up to 48 hours during periods of low or no connectivity.

Users can select the quality of the video they want to view and track the downloading process straight from their mobile device, she noted. "This feature gives users the ability to save both their time and their data."

Down with buffering

In 2013, YouTube users across the globe spent a collective 11 million hours each day waiting for videos to buffer. Were this amount of time spent on an actual video streaming Web site, that platform would be the fifth largest in the US.

Thompson Rivera outlined that YouTube is actively working to tackle this much-reviled reality of the Internet. Aside from the offline functionality, she cited "adaptive streaming" as one way to reduce time spent waiting for videos to load. This better caters to people who have a high level of broadband variability because the quality of video is adapted in real-time depending how users' bandwidth changes. She also mentioned video compression technology as a strategy to combat buffering.

On the African continent, infrastructural constraints and high data costs make it difficult to provide users with an experience to rival their Western counterparts, she continued. And that is why YouTube opted to rethink its strategies and partner with the necessary industry players to improve the experience for African markets.

"This is not about getting people to watch more videos. Video is about more than entertainment. The Internet, which is typically text heavy and written in English, is a pretty daunting place. Video can serve as a bridge for users to make the Internet more relatable and approachable.

"The combination of sight, sound and motion has the power to entertain and educate unlike any other medium."

Share