YouTube is considering carrying a popular YouTube Music feature over to the main app.
The latest addition to the platform’s youtube.com/new hub, where it lets Premium members sign up to test experimental features, is “smart downloads.”
This feature detects when users are connected to wi-fi and uses that connection to download up to 20 recommended videos per week to their device. The idea is to create a kind of automatic backup so users will still have content to watch if they happen to lose internet and/or cell service.
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Smart downloads appear in the user’s Library tab, in the Downloads section.
If users don’t have enough phone storage to download all of the week’s 20 videos, they’ll apparently receive some kind of notification “that they need to take extra steps for Smart downloads to continue,” per YouTube.
As 9to5Google points out, smart downloads are very similar to a feature already available to Premium YouTube Music subscribers. The Music version of the feature automatically downloads songs based on users’ previous listening histories.
Offerings in the /new hub are usually available to all Premium users, but for now, the smart downloads test is only available to some users in Europe, and only available on Android phones.
