Listen to music and view videos offline on mobile
HERE’S HOW TO SAVE YOURSELF FROM SCARY BILLS, AND KEEP WATCHING THE CONTENT YOU LOVE.
WHILE YOUR HOME internet connection might have unlimited downloads, it’s a pretty safe bet that’s the same is not the case for your mobile. Most mobile accounts don’t just charge you a little extra for downloads above the limit, either — they charge you through the nose for even small amounts of data. If you’ve ever had a major mobile bill shock, it’s probably streaming media that’s to blame.
Thankfully, pretty much all of the major streaming services have a solution to the bandwidth crunch on mobiles: offline viewing. Offline viewing is perfect if you want to watch stuff on the train on the way to work, or if you’re going on holidays and you want to load up some shows to keep the kids entertained.
So how do you use it? Let’s look at four of the biggest services, starting with Netflix.
NETFLIX
Netflix introduced offline viewing in late 2016, and it’s available on iOS, Android and Windows. For the latter, you will need to download the official Netflix app from the Microsoft Store. You can’t use offline viewing with the browser interface.
Not every video is available for offline viewing. The exceptions tend to be the big studio blockbusters, such as Disney and Marvel movies. Most of the other content, including all Netflix originals, are available for offline viewing.
Using it is straightforward. The first thing you should do before downloading anything is set up the download quality. Open the app’s Settings and find the ‘Download Quality’ setting. It defaults to Standard, which is SD quality and uses about 1GB per hour of content. On High, it uses about 3GB per hour.
On Android devices, you’ll also have the option to choose the download location: internal storage or the SD card.
Now you just have to flag videos for offline viewing. When you look at the information page for a show, if it’s available for download, there will be a download icon. Just tap or click on it to start the download and you’ll see a progress dial as it starts the download.
Finally, to view the shows you’ve downloaded, open the sidebar by tapping on or clicking on the hamburger on the top left, then choose ‘My downloads’ to see a list of everything you’ve stored locally.
SPOTIFY
Spotify lets you listen offline — but only if you’re a Premium subscriber. If you are, then all you have to do is go to Your Library in the Spotify App in iOS or Android. At the top of your list of songs, there is a Download toggle. You’ll find the same toggle in the Settings of the Windows app. Switch it on and Spotify will attempt to download your entire library.
You also have the option to choose the download quality — Normal, High or Extreme — by going into the app settings. A four-minute song will take a little less than 3MB of storage at Normal (which is 96kbps), about 5MB at High (160kbps) and 9.5MB at Extreme (320kbps). On Android, you can also choose to save to an SD Card by tapping on Storage.
Once you’ve downloaded your songs, go into the Spotify settings and find the ‘Offline Mode’ toggle. Switch it on, and you’ll only see the songs that have been downloaded and Spotify will use no data.
We should make a final note that, even if you’re not a Premium subscriber and even if you don’t enable downloads, Spotify does use less data than you might think. It will cache recently played songs locally to save on bandwidth, up to a storage limit that depends
on how much free space your device has. If you have a relatively short playlist that you’ve recently listened to, you may find that listening to those songs again consumes very little data.
If you’re interested, you can fix the cache size on Windows by navigating to: C:\Users\ UserName\AppData\Roaming\Spotify
Where UserName is the name of your user profile. Open the prefs file in Notepad and add this line on the end: storage.size=1024 The ‘1024’ there is the cache limit, in megabytes. This would limit the cache to 1,024MB (1GB). You can enter a different number (for example, 2,048 would give you a 2GB cache).
STAN
As part of its ‘do everything that Netflix does’ policy, Stan introduced offline viewing on iOS and Android a few months after Netflix did. It works almost identically to Netflix’s offline streaming, including the fact that not every title is available for offline viewing.
Just as with Netflix, you’ll see a download button on a video’s information page. Tap on it to start the download. To see all the things you’ve downloaded, go to the menu and select ‘My Downloads’. It will list all the downloads and their storage usage. Otherwise, you have 30 days to watch them before they expire.
You can change the quality of the downloads by going to App Settings.
YOUTUBE
A feature only available to YouTube Red subscribers, YouTube lets you download videos to your mobile for offline viewing. Not all videos are available for offline viewing, though the vast majority are.
To use the offline downloading feature, just start playing a video in the mobile app. Below the video, you’ll see a download button — tap on it to start the download. YouTube will, by default, ask what quality you’d like to download in and will tell you how much storage it will use. These numbers can vary quite a lot depending on the video itself, but on average, it will use quite a bit less than something like Netflix.
You can also set a default quality by tapping on the user icon on the top left, going into Settings and find the ‘Background & Downloads’ options.
To view your downloaded videos, just tap on the Library button in the YouTube app. Look for Downloads under the ‘Available Offline’ section to see your list of downloaded videos. As long as you connect to the internet and open the YouTube app once every 30 days, they will stay permanently on your device — but if you’re offline for more than 30 days they’ll be deleted.