YouTube Video Downloads

In the ongoing quest to make YouTube profitable, Google is adding the ability to download videos to watch offline. Here’s the scoop from the Tube’s themselves:

You have the option of downloading and storing your favorite Partner videos and watching these videos even without an internet connection. To download Partner video:

1. Find the video you’d like to download.
2. Below the video’s play bar in the lower left hand corner, you’ll see a ‘Download‘ button.
3. Click the ‘Download‘ button to indicate that you’d like to download the video.

Please note:

• Not all videos have the option to download enabled. Only certain Partner videos have this feature. If you do not see the download button below the video, it means downloading is not yet enabled for the video.
• Videos are available for download in MP4 format only.

Here’s what the download option looks like for a video from Stanford:

Now I can take my computational fluid dynamics vids on the go ! As mentioned above, YouTube is also offering the ability for users to assign a price to download. Payment is collected through Google Checkout, and the video is added to a list of purchased videos. Here you can see Household Hacker charging a buck to download their vid:

Seems kinda silly since there are plenty of tools available for downloading YouTube videos for free. However, YouTube is working to prevent users from downloading content for free with third party ripping tools (like the Firefox plugin DownloadHelper) :

These tools violate the YouTube terms of service ( I got the screenshot from a friend), and using them could get you banned and shunned by society.

What’s the Point?

All in all, I’m not really blown away with this offering. Have people been clammoring for this ? I sure as hell haven’t. What are you supposed to do with these downloaded videos ? Start amassing a YouTube video collection ? Put them on your ipod so you can force feed your favorite videos to your friends when you’re not near a computer? I don’t get it even if it is free, but once you start charging it makes even less sense.

Most YouTube videos are 5mins or less, so unless the price point is extremely low (like 5-10 cents) it doesn’t seem worth it. The household hacker video I used as an example is under 2 minutes long and would cost $.99 to download. That’s about a penny a second when I’m positive I’ll never need to watch it again. Even if I did want to watch it again, I’m pretty sure I’m able to do that for free ON YOUTUBE. Why would I then pay (any amount of money) to rewatch that video offline ?

Am I missing out on some awesome use for this?