Last week, Google introduced YouTube offline feature in India, Indonesia and the Philippines, that allows you to watch YouTube videos offline.
You can take your favorite YouTube video for offline viewing by tapping on the “offline icon”. Once you tap on it, the YouTube video is downloaded to your device and can be played back for up to 48 hours without internet connectivity.
But what is this 48 hour rule?
You might have seen the text saying “2 days remaining” when you navigate to the YouTube app’s offline tab. That is because, the YouTube offline video which is available on your device is cached and once cached, it is available for offline viewing for up to 48 hours without the need for an internet connection.
So, how to break this 48 hour cycle?
From my observation, I can interpret that if you connect your device to the internet at least once in the 48 hour cycle, the YouTube app refreshes the cache which in turn increases the deadline to another 48 hours.
To support my statement, I would like to add that the YouTube videos which were added for offline viewing on Thursday (ie. When Google introduced YouTube Offline) are accessible even today (ie. December 17, 2014)… which clearly means that if you connect to the Internet once in 48 hours, the YouTube app refreshes the cache and therefore your offline video will be accessible without any problem.
Hope this helps!
Hi, Thanks for sharing this trick, I was not knowing about this offline feature. I think this is a good feature but I wonder if we could keep those videos permanently on our devices?
AFAIK, the YouTube Offline videos will be there on your device unless and until you forget to refresh the 48 hour cache period.
connect to internet? is it wifi only? or data is okay?
Seems to be wifi only
I’m not sure if the 48 hour is in India only because my offline videos have been available for some weeks now. The only problem is that I can only access it with the youtube app.