Youtube videos to be soon available offline in India

YouTube users in India will soon be able to save videos from the Google-owned service, making it possible to watch them offline, and the feature will eventually be available globally, the company said on Monday.

“Within the coming few weeks, much of YouTube will be available offline in India. This is huge, and our users will really, really like this. You can download a video once, save it to your phone, and watch it again and again,” Google's Ceaser Sengupta said at the Android One launch event in Gurgaon.

According to industry reports, the online video consumption is pegged at over 3.7 billion videos per month in the country. According to comscore, the total online video audience in India saw growth of over 70 per cent in 2013 with the average viewer watching 18 per cent more videos and spending 28 per cent more time viewing. Video consumption on mobile phones has also been growing steadily in the country.

YouTube alone gets over 60 million unique users a month and about one-third of the traffic coming from mobile phones.

“If you are a regular Google+ user and have uploaded plenty of videos to share with your circles, or if you have Google+ Photos Auto backup on your mobile device, you will be able to import all these videos to YouTube. This way you can easily store those videos on YouTube, share it with your fans and keep uploading awesome content in your channel,” a Google employee confirmed on a blog.

The YouTube users will now discover an 'Import Videos' option on their upload page and if you have a video content in your Google + account then clicking this link will highlight it and allow you to import it directly to your YouTube channel.