YouTube Go to be accessible in Beta, an 'Offline-First' App for India

Tech giant Google recently created a buzz by announcing that it is rolling out a mobile YouTube application intended for India, which in return will boost the search company's occurrence in a growing market with mottled Internet access.

Since the plunge, the tech giant is engaged in conducting wide-ranging tests in India of YouTube Go, allowing users to save videos to watch offline and monitor their data use. According to the company executives, while the beta version of the app has been released in the Google Play Store in India, and will also be released in other rising markets later.

Analysts are forecasting a pour in video consumption in India since Reliance Jio, the telecom unit of Reliance Industries Ltd, upended the industry last year with cheap data plans that have poked competitors to lower the prices.

The Silicon Valley has long regarded India, with its population of 1.3 billion people and deprived connectivity, as a major place to check products for rising markets. To this, the YouTube executives said they wanted to put up a product for Indian users from the ground up rather than releasing a slimmed-down description of their primary app.

"As we talked to people in the market, they didn't want something that felt like a stripped down version of YouTube - they wanted the full experience," said John Harding, vice president of engineering at YouTube.

The YouTube team has contemplated showing the users a sequence of images from a video with the audio, like a slideshow, due to the disturbance of trying to load video at slow Internet speeds. But Indian consumers reacted poorly to the feature.

The ultimate design helps out users to determine videos that trending in their province while minimizing data usage. Users can preview videos prior to watching to make sure that is what they want.

As we all know that the Reliance Jio's entry has enhanced the video consumption in India, analyst Neil Shah of Counterpoint Technology Market Research questioned whether YouTube Go would remain popular as cheap data plans become more prevalent.

"The only future I see for YouTube Go is for feature phones or basic phones," he wrote in an email.