Video subscriptions - Offline view via an app?

looking for offline viewing as well. Sad to see it nonexisting ahead of my 10 hour flight across Atlantic =(

Ha ha, I have few flights these upcoming weeks, some of them over 20 hours (Tokyo <-> Paris). Would have been nice to catch up to some tech videos, too bad.
Shame that it couldā€™ve been even the subject of a tutorial (HLS, AV framework, caching, security, etc).

@rwenderlich Any idea if this is still on your plan? Itā€™s been 2 years and no update.

We havenā€™t forgotten about this :] I still donā€™t have an ETA as weā€™re a small team and weā€™re working on a few things that take priority, but we will have this at some point!

Hey
I think a parallel offline facility to view the videos will be a good addition in near future
Thanks
Sumit Gupta
Servo Stabilizer

another vote for offline functionality!

Another vote for offline feature!

Hi. This has been an oft demanded feature.
Itā€™s not a ā€œnice to haveā€ feature! Itā€™s a ā€œcritical featureā€ for all of us here who are on the go.

Itā€™s been requested since 2016 by numerous users and I personally have about 4 requests made and answered by RW team. But this is getting a bit silly - RW team is just kicking the ball down the road without commiting to doing this or not doing this.

I understand your constraint of your team size. But for us this is a question of keeping our subscription or not. So please give us an answer as to when itā€™s in the pipeline or if itā€™s not being done. I can take my call to abandon this subscription or not.

Whatā€™s being done by RW is not at all fair or transparent. 3 yrs of giving the same standard reason to users while accepting their subscription is quite unethical in my view point.

Thanks for checking in. We only have 2 engineers and 1 designer on our engineering team, along with a huge backlog of things we want to do. This project is definitely on the list, unfortunately it isnā€™t at the top at the moment.

If this is a ā€œmust haveā€ feature for you, you might want to consider cancelling until we have developed the app. Sorry for the inconvenience!

Hi Ray.

Thank you for the honest answer.
In all honesty, I understand his frustration, and to be completely honest, I feel pretty much the same, Iā€™m just the silent type.

As this is a vital feature for me, I actually did what you suggest: Cancelling the subscription and waiting, but the wait is long.

While I understand the limitation with fewer engineers working on the website, might you consider a course like ā€œLetā€™s make NetFlix-like (RayFlix?) appā€?
Iā€™d personally be super interested by a subscription tutorial, as almost all streaming apps, ncluding Appleā€™s, offer downloads and offline playback while securing the content and check for subscription validity.
With most of the internet going the Saas/subscription way, not only it would be a good tutorial, but you can even use the excuse to allocate engineering resources into your own platform.

Another suggestion/question: While waiting to get your own app, why canā€™t you make your content available in one of the numerous eLearning video subscription services out there? The most famous all have good streaming/offline playback apps.

Until then, Iā€™ll keep funneling my money to the books, which I own almost all, hoping that one day, this 3y old thread reaches conclusion.

Once we make an app, I think making a companion course that explains how to build an app like that would be a great idea! That way, the work put into making the app has a double benefit - the app itself, plus a helpful course for subscribers.

FYI, we did do some initial work on an app by building a prototype, which we demonstrated at RWDevCon 2018: https://www.raywenderlich.com/5159-cloning-netflix

Unfortunately we havenā€™t had time to finish the prototype into a full-fledged app yet :[

As for making our content available on other sites, unfortunately that doesnā€™t fit in with our long-term goals for our site.

Anyway - sorry itā€™s taking us so long on this - but we are doing the best we can with the team size we have. :]

1 Like

Hi Sam, any updates on this?

Hi @robertomachorro

The raywenderlich.com app is under active development, and is scheduled for launch later this year. It will include the ability to download videos for offline viewing. All being well, this long-sought-after functionality will be in your hands before 2020.

cheers

sam

3 Likes

Hi there @samdavies, is the app already available in app store? I couldnā€™t find it app store. Can u please paste a link. thanks.

Hi @afiq90 sorry to continue to disappoint youā€”itā€™s currently be working on as I type. Will be available in the App Store in the next couple of months.

Apologies for the delay.

sam