Facebook is piloting an offline video viewing feature in India, by letting users save videos within its mobile app, reports TechCrunch. The pilot will go live on July 11th for a select number of users in India; users can view downloaded videos by launching the Facebook app, but they will not be allowed to save videos on the phone’s memory. Apart from disabling local storage of videos, publishers or page admins can manually disable video saving from their Page’s Content Distribution setting, Facebook said in a letter to publishers (which TechCrunch has a copy of). This is meant to keep a check on piracy. The company said in the letter that only original videos posted by individual users and other pages (who don’t disable downloads) can be saved via the new feature. TechCrunch points out that instead of announcing the feature through a blog post, Facebook forwarded the update as a mail to publishers only. While a spokesperson from Facebook told MediaNama, that the pilot was created after it got feedback from markets like India where mobile Internet connectivity is limited. In order to bring a better video experience on Facebook for users in these areas, it will be testing the feature in locations with limited connectivity, it added. YouTube offline viewing: The offline viewing feature by Facebook is going on test mode when YouTube had launched a similar feature last month, which allowed users in India to save videos overnight within the mobile app by taking advantage of cheaper…
