Wednesday 2 September 2015

Netflix stays resistant to offline viewing, despite Amazon's big new feature

Netflix stays resistant to offline viewing, despite Amazon's big new feature

This week Amazon announced that its Prime video streaming service will now let users download films and TV shows for offline viewing - a feature that rival Netflix still does not have.

A few months ago Netflix told us that offline viewing was "never going to happen" and it seems that, despite Amazon's announcement, nothing has changed.

We asked if Netflix might reconsider the idea, but a spokesperson told us that its position remains the same: with increasing levels of Wi-Fi coverage and climbing internet speeds, the ability to stream in more places lessens the need for downloads.

An Epix disappointment

While might be true to some extent, there are plenty of situations where we're out of reach of reliable Wi-Fi - on a bus, a plane - and where offline caching suddenly seems like a brilliant idea.

With the new feature, Amazon is getting a massive leg up in the streaming race. It also comes at a bad time for Netflix, which just announced it would not be renewing its subscription with Epix, meaning a number of titles will be disappearing from the US online library next month.

Soon-to-be-gone movies include The Wolf of Wall Street, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire and World War Z - although we can't say we're too upset about that last one.










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