14 DAY TRIAL // Facebook is surely the world's biggest social network, and the company manages to keep its leading position by constantly offering new features to users. One of the latest is video downloads for offline viewing, and while the feature hasn't arrived yet, Facebook plans to test it in India, starting July 11.
Facebook intends to allow users to download videos that they come across on the platform and view them offline. Everyone will be able to sync videos to their smartphones and watch them in the Facebook app while they're on WiFi so that mobile data is spared.
This move is clearly aimed at video publishers, who have been affected by the fact that the company has recently decided to change the feed ranking algorithm and prioritize the user's friends over professional content providers.
Videos are downloaded inside the app, not in the device's local memory
According to TechCrunch, Facebook has even thought about video downloads turning into piracy, and that's why it has decided to securely lock videos within its application so that they wouldn't be seen in the device's local memory.
The feature isn't automatically enabled, and publishers who don't want their content to be downloaded can opt out from the feature. The setting is available under the Page Content Distribution menu. The move allows users to only download original videos featured on personal accounts or Pages.
Facebook will be rolling out the option for a small group of users based in India, starting July 11, 2016. It's unclear if the option will be made available worldwide, but the chances are that, if the feature is well-received, it will be expanded to users from other countries as well.
Just recently, Facebook incorporated SMS in its Messenger application for Android smartphones, thus providing a major feature to the app, in an attempt to keep users inside Facebook applications and prevent them from launching other services for messaging friends.