Facebook is definitely the world's largest social network, and the company manages to maintain its leadership position by constantly offering new features for users. One of the latest features is video downloads for offline viewing, and while the feature hasn't arrived yet, Facebook plans to test it first in India, starting on July 11.
Facebook intends to allow users to download videos they watch on the platform and view them offline. Anyone will be able to sync videos to their smartphone and watch them on the Facebook app while connected to WiFi so as to save on mobile data.
This move is clearly aimed at video publishers, who have been affected by the fact that the company recently decided to change the feed ranking algorithm and prioritize the user's friends over professionals.
According to TechCrunch, Facebook has thought that video downloads can be turned into pirated material, which is why it decided to lock down the security of videos within its app so that they don't appear in the device's local storage.
The feature isn't automatically enabled, and publishers who don't want their content to be available for download can opt out of the feature. The setting is available in the Page Content Distribution menu. The move allows users to download only the original video that you display on personal accounts or pages.
Facebook will make the feature available to a small group of users based in India, starting on July 11, 2016. It's unclear whether the option will be available worldwide, but chances are that if the feature is good, it will expand to users in other countries as well.
Just recently, Facebook integrated SMS into its Messenger app for Android smartphones, thus providing an important feature to the app, in an effort to keep users inside Facebook apps and prevent them from launching other services to send messages to their friends.
