As part of its Google for India campaign, last year in September, Google had announced that it will be building a new YouTube app from scratch which will give users more control over how much data is consumed while watching or saving a particular video. They even launched a preview of the app on Play Store, and allowed people to register for being among the first ones to get the app. In fact, they gave the app a tagline, which read, “Ab Mazze udao, data nahin!”, which roughly translates to ‘now have fun without losing too much data’. Now, after about five months, the app has finally gone live on the Play Store and is available for download.
Essentially, the app has two significant purposes to serve, one it allows offline viewing, and two it is meant to combat the data connectivity woes that users in India face. The app has been released in India, and will soon be rolled out to other emerging markets as well. Basically, now users have a new YouTube app, which will have the same content as the original app, however, on YouTube Go users will be able to preview videos when offline, share them with nearby friends when without data, and of course also download videos to watch when offline later.
Now, you would naturally say that the existing YouTube app already allows users to save videos offline and watch them later, even if there is no internet connection, so why YouTube Go? Well, the idea was to help users save their mobile data by allowing them to saving videos on Wi-Fi and then watch it later. The YouTube Go app improves this feature by letting users choose the resolution in which they want to watch or save the video, and also inform how much data will be consumed on different resolutions. If you are not sure what to expect from the video, the app will now give you a short preview of the entire video. Clicking on a video thumbnail will trigger the quick preview feature. So if you are data conscious, this app is for you.
YouTube Go now available for download in India; here’s how it works
