Netflix starts offline viewing; here is what the competition has on offer

Video streaming services are on the rise with media networks in India following the Netflix strategy. Most services are aimed at providing content to consumers hooked on to the internet, those who don’t the have time to consume content on the idiot box, or in the traditional sense, television. Yesterday, Netflix finally added the most requested feature that its customers had long been asking for. The media streaming giant now allows users to download content to **watch it offline** at some later point. This brought back the debate of how important the addition of offline video is and which is the best video streaming platform out there. We tried out 11 video streaming services and decided to pit them against each other. The video streaming platforms that we used were a mix of Indian as well as international video streaming services which comprised of ditooTV, Google Play Movies & TV, HOOQ, Hotstar, Jio Cinema, JioTV, Netflix, OZEE, SonyLIV, TVFPlay and Voot. We could not compare **Amazon Prime Video** as the service is set to launch in India soon according to rumours. We have mentioned the parameters that we measured the services against and there was no particular standard when we looked at Quality, Languages and Pricing as most platforms had their interpretation of the term. Most of the platforms did not define what “High Quality” meant for the platform in technical terms, so we took the highest available measure and assumed that to be 720p unless stated otherwise.  Similarly, some platforms offered multiple tiers of price points which we standardised to pricing on the cheapest level per month.

Conclusion Looking at all the video services available online and going by the experience, Hotstar and Netflix came out on top. We chose these two services keeping in mind the features offered, along with the quality of the mobile apps (UI), their websites and variety of content (movies, TV shows, documentaries etc.) offered. Netflix also allows **4K streaming for Windows 10** PCs which no other video streaming app provides from the list. Google Play Movies & TV lags slightly behind with regards to features offered but these three services seem to offer better quality, variety and value for the money and these are the very factors that matter to most users.