As per reports, YouTube lets its Premium users download videos on the web and view them offline.
This has been available for mobile YouTube users for a while and now comes to web users. While this is still in testing, YouTube offers downloading videos in desired resolution upto 1080p, and only for Premium users as of now.
Downloading YouTube Videos Offline
While you can watch most videos on YouTube for free, you always need an active internet connection to do so. Therefore, most users use various tools to download the videos to local storage and view or share them later to remove this hassle.
As this leads to growing piracy, YouTube itself introduced an offline downloading option, which will store the video in the YouTube downloads section. But, this has been available only in mobile YouTube clients till now and is coming to the web version soon.
As seen by Android Police, few Premium users in India, France, and the US have spotted a new toggle option in their YouTube Labs Page, where they can enable downloading videos. Once done, the option will show up in the line of Share and Playlist buttons.
As per images shared by those eligible, the feature is only available until the 19th of October and will work only on the latest versions of Chrome, Edge, or Opera Browsers. Users will download a video in and up to 1080p resolution (though the video can stream in 1440p or higher).
And the downloaded videos will be played in a dedicated local section, which you need to spot at youtube.com/feed/downloads. You can also delete them all together in the siteโs cache to free up space. While Premium users on the web are testing this, itโs been available to all mobile users for a while now.