Today we have another example of why feature rollouts for big websites are a real pain because official YouTube video downloads have arrived in South Africa, but not really. It’s complicated.
As a quick primer downloading videos on the YouTube mobile app has been around for years at this point. It’s either available for everyone or tied to a paid YouTube Premium subscription depending on your region. If you don’t see the option there it’s likely because you need to cough up some money to Google to access it.
Up until now this has been exclusive to the app but now it appears on desktop too when visiting YouTube through a browser.
According to this experimental features page, which outlines new content for Premium subscribers, this new feature is only available until 10th December.
There’s two problems with that: this feature only showed up for us today, 9th December, and we doubt Google would open up something new for people to try for a single day.
The other problem is that the note about browser downloads doesn’t even appear all the time. Even if you have access to the ability to download, this page may not display the news of it. Weird.
“How to use: click on the ‘download’ button while watching a video or click on the 3-dot menu when you’re browsing.” the page reads, when it appears.
“Note: This is only available on computers with the latest versions of Chrome, Edge or Opera browsers.”
The download button should appear between the share and save buttons, as you can see in the header image above.
Once you have videos downloaded you can view them on a new dedicated downloads page on YouTube.
From here you can watch the videos even when offline and you can click on the top right corner to access the download settings.
The quality of the downloads and the ability to delete all downloads seem to be the only options for now.
Of final note here is that movies (and presumably TV shows) bought from the Google Play Store can not be downloaded.
To sanity check yourself below is a video from our YouTube channel about a bit of South Africa appearing in Borderlands 3. The download option should be there for it if you open the below embed in YouTube, unless Google has ended the download video feature, region availability is in play or YouTube Premium is needed. It really is a lucky bag.
