Soon, YouTube is going to let you download videos from your mobile devices to watch offline. The company announced today that the feature would let users “add videos to their device to watch for a short period when an Internet connection is unavailable.”
Until now, downloading YouTube videos has been against the service’s terms and conditions, but the company has been relaxing the restriction. Last year the company began implementing pre-downloading of videos in its Android app, letting people finishing watch a video offline so long as they had started it online. We’ll have to wait to see exactly how this new offline feature works in comparison when it debuts sometime in November.
Update: Peter Kafka over at All Things D reports that videos can be stored offline on mobile devices for up to 48 hours starting next month.
Update 2: All Things D has some additional details about the feature thanks to an email that was reportedly sent to YouTube content partners. Along with revealing some implementation details and the fact that videos will be enabled for offline viewing by default, the memo notes that movies and television shows will not work with the new feature.