【History Archives】

Christmas just arrived early for binge-watchers everywhere. Netflix giving us an offline viewing option—but not necessarily for everything in its library.

Starting today,History Archives Netflix subscribers can choose to download movies and TV shows to watch later—even when they don't have an internet connection. The company announced the surprise update on Tuesday in a blog post:

Many of your favorite streaming series and movies are already available for download, with more on the way, so there is plenty of content available for those times when you are offline. For example, Orange is The New Black, Narcos and The Crown are available for download today.

This may be another way of saying that not allof Netflix's content is available for download. Netflix's homegrown shows like The Crown are sure bets. However, it's likely that Netflix has to make deals with each of their content partners to secure download rights.

Netflix is not exactly a pioneer in this area. Amazon introduced a similar feature for its Prime video streaming service over a year ago.

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We've still got questions about the feature, like how many episodes you can download, and how long the download files stay resident on your mobile device. Netflix's help page doesmention download quality (stating that you can choose between Standard and Higher), but warns that the latter requires more storage space, and takes longer to download. The page also recommends iOS 8.0 or later and Android 4.4.2 or later to support the new download-friendly app.