So now there's YouTube app (which doens't allow me to listen to a talk offline on an airplane or background or pay for YouTube Red), YouTube Music app (which I'm not allowed to use at all), YouTube Gaming (which has an UI and UX build by a madman). Then there's AndroidTV version of YouTube app which has severe feature limitations and probably some others as well. I don't really like to be negative, but it doesn't seem that Google has any idea what to do with YouTube or any interest of expanding it to EU and the rest of the world. Not to mention the rampant catastrophe that's ContentID police system that's benefiting only large corporate abusers with no recourse.<p>So I wonder, will I perhaps be able to watch talks and other videos on an airplane now using YouTube Go? Which subset of functionality will work on this soon-to-be-abandoned app? Does it even address any of the issues that content creators, Google and us users have with the platform?
Hopefully this will actually work in <i>all</i> countries; I'd love to save videos for offline viewing while I have a wifi connection and watch them later when I don't. But that would compete with "YouTube Red".<p>For that matter, since an offline video eliminates the buffering problem, I'd love to have the "playback speed" feature in the mobile app. The web version of YouTube supports changing the playback speed to 1.25x, 1.5x, or 2x, but the mobile version doesn't.
Google still doesn't know what it's doing with YouTube. As a longtime consumer of YouTube videos, and somebody who is actually inside of the YouTube community, I understand that. The "Advertiser Friendly" policy was universally mocked for being absurd, and it is. Then there's the indication that it was behind the inexplicable monetization drops on major channels a few months back. The YouTube team has been seen to do some good stuff as well, like the Community tab, but if they want to keep the communities they've built, and the near monopoly on online video they have, they need to get out of their ivory tower, and actually understand that when they make decisions they have real effects on the monetary income of real people, and that when they change their algorithm or site design, people actually go out of business.<p>However, at least in this case, they're taking a step in the right direction, no matter how small.
As much as this sounds like something I would personally be very interested in, I can't help but think it doesn't fit into Google's ideal of how customers use their products. Rather I get the impression they're pursuing this begrudgingly just as a way to get into the Indian market; the announcement is notably non-committal about it ever being rolled out in the US.
This should be made available every where. But then they can't charge us for offline and background play.<p>YT would get more views actually if they allowed offline now. It would also help with the puny data allowances wireless carriers are imposing these days. The offline will take the power away (in a small way), from the carriers.<p>They can provide the same experience as today, ads and all. People can watch YT on flights, while driving and what not. Amazon video allows offline usage today and been for a while.
"While in Nagpur, I met a young man who loved using YouTube to watch WWE wrestling and wanted to show us his favorite video. But after he found it and tapped to play, the video just wouldn’t load"<p>I believe this is really bad example, as WWE is a "premium content" so you have to pay extra to watch it. Therefore Youtube removes those videos (there is only 2 WWE videos which is from legal accounts).<p>So it's pretty awkward example just as "the young man in Nagpur wants to watch Game of Thrones with his HBO Go membership but he can't because of he is poor internet connection."
I don't understand why a new app if this could just be an additional feature in the current app. Doesn't this lead to fragmentation and confusion?
Grr... Is google seeking praise for slightly loosening the shackles?<p>This "YouTube Go" MIGHT be a media player. It MIGHT operate on files. It MIGHT be possible to share a video via some mechanism other than bluetooth.<p>The other day I was trying to convince to a user that she should want to own her content, rather than rent it... when I suddenly realized that he doesn't know what a file is. Moreover, he doesn't realize what it is good for...<p>Once you have a (DRM free) file, it's yours. You physically possess it. That means you can copy it, share it, back it up, print it, pipe the raw ones and zeros to your PC speaker, whatever. The next generation might not get that...<p>The fact of the matter is that until I was college-aged, nobody taught me more about computers than Microsoft did. I read every .txt file and .hlp file that existed on my C:\ drive. Not to mention the physical manuals... Then I went on to Linux, etc.<p>So I KNOW what a file is. You and I can have a conversation about mtimes. We can rattle off a list of traits that each file must possess to BE a file.<p>What the heck is Google teaching this next generation?
>But even as they discover the joys of YouTube, their experience is not great on slower connections and less powerful mobile phone ..<p>Or on fast connections but with data caps. So outside of wifi, Youtube is unusable. I'll watch two-three videos and I'll hit my monthly cap.<p>Almost every single issue India users experience is a problem everywhere else. Every solution they came up with would be useful for users everywhere else. It feels like Google engineers live in the SV bubble where unlimited always-on connectivity is a fact of life. So thanks Google.
I would love the ability to leave a video playing on my phone when I turn the screen off. I often will listen to a song but as soon as the app minimizes or the phone goes to sleep mode, it stops.
Holy shit you guys, some people <i>actually</i> use our apps from devices lacking an always-on connection! This is the revolution that will give rise to Web 4.0 -- apps that can work without the internet! It'll be the biggest thing since the recent development of Web pages that automatically reconfigure to fit different screen sizes!
> But even as they discover the joys of YouTube, their experience is not great on slower connections and less powerful mobile phones.<p>Why not just make this the norm? Websites do not need to be 6 MB per page (and that's with an adblocker). Google is one of the worst offenders when it comes to website bloat, including their once-famously incredibly simple search page which is now jam packed with tons of features, both requested and the majority not requested by anyone.<p>The notion that an HTML 5 web page requires so much extra fluff to accomplish something as simple as streaming video with recommended links and a comments section is maddening.<p>Just because some of us have bigger, faster phones with more bandwidth doesn't mean you need to make things more complicated.
So can I finally delete the fortune app from my phone? I think this forced installation of tens of useless Google apps on android is horrible. I don't use their crappy services and I should be able to delete their apps from my phone. And I don't want to root because that invalidates knox in my phone, which I need for office stuff.<p>I'm excited to use this new app but the older one should be deletable.
On Android there is also Youtube Downloader that works quite nicely: <a href="https://dentex.github.io/apps/youtubedownloader/" rel="nofollow">https://dentex.github.io/apps/youtubedownloader/</a>
well it would be cool if i could tag a bunch of videos to be viewed offline in the app.
I have a music list on youtube and sometimes i have for example a political debate that is an hour long, it would be cool if i could just tap on it in youtube to make it offline viewable instead of going through the massive hassle of downloading it somehow, transferring it to the phone etc and then maybe i dont want to watch it anyway..
I want to know who or what will decide what to put in the preview. Will content creators have any control over this? If previews are strictly algorithmic, will there be recourse in case a certain preview misrepresents or spoils the content?
From <a href="http://www.youtubego.com/signup/" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtubego.com/signup/</a><p>> Mazze udao, data nahin<p>What language is this?
since long time ago I could download youtube for offline watching already so what's new here, I tried two minutes to read this article and gave up, I wish it pinpoints what youtube-go really is and give me the answer in 144 words.
From a user perspective, the purpose of YouTube is to play out videos. Time spent in YouTube's user interface is a means for getting to the videos. But from Google's perspective, the revenue comes from time in the user interface, where the ads are.<p>"Reimagined" probably means "more ad slots".
Great to see Google splintering off into single duty compartments instead of spreading itself so thin that nothing gets done with the same amount of focus. Alphabet was a true design decision, and a mature one at that. One thing that crossed my mind recently was the notion of Google and its long relationship with hardware: we have this thing called the Blockchain now, and it could do with some of Google's hardware to run on, instead of independent factions of people spending their pocket money on their own hardware. It kind of makes me jealous and annoyed that so much could be spent for what effectively is sometimes just a data center for storing people's holiday snaps on Google Plus, when it could be used to host micro democracies and change the direction of finance. I suspect all that hardware will eventually be re-purposed many times throughout the course of the Google experiment and probably will eventually be given away at some point to the blockchainers who need it. I can picture the scene: dreadlocked decentralists rejoicing at their new hardware gift from Google, 25+ years from now. The ultimate redemption from their years of slavishly handing their personal information over to Google in exchange for a decent search experience. A true revenge for consumers of Google. Meanwhile Google would have entirely switched to SSDs and are probably using post-quantum chips, but at least we can host multiple different blockchains now without spending our pocket money on them. The blockchainers can start to get rich and blockchain can really flourish. Also, Google needs to create services which are for a post Snowden world. Allo is cute, but entirely inferior to things like Signal which addresses the problem of encrypted private chat head on. Google needs to create things like its own VPN service, perhaps?