YouTube continues to expand its plans for Shorts. The platform, which offered the option to download videos and watch them offline a while ago, will now allow you to download Shorts. Here is the Shorts Smart Downloads support for YouTube.
Watch Shorts videos offline with Smart Downloads
YouTube aims to expand the reach of short videos as part of its Shorts Smart Downloads test feature. With this feature, users will be able to download Shorts even when they are offline. However, the automatic downloading of videos has also raised some controversy.
The Smart Downloads option is currently only available to YouTube Premium subscribers as part of an experimental program. Premium subscribers can sign up to try the feature in the YouTube mobile app or on the platform’s experimental features page. It’s only available on Android.
Once registered, the Downloads section of the YouTube app will include a “Smart Downloads” area. This area will automatically display Shorts videos based on the user’s viewing history. Downloaded Shorts videos will be available offline.
YouTube first introduced support for automatically downloading videos in the background over Wi-Fi last year. This feature, called Smart Downloads, has now been extended to Shorts videos.
The automatic downloading of Smart Downloads raised a question mark for some users. After activating this feature, YouTube will download multiple Shorts videos to the user’s device. This will lead to more cache usage.
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