While it doesn’t totally offer complete freedom when it comes to downloading your favorite content, the ability to watch shows and movies while offline makes it a great choice for your commute to work on the subway, or when traveling for work on a plane. The ability to take shows and movies offline is one of those features users assumed were impossible, thanks to how Netflix works, but in reality Netflix was working behind the scenes to bring downloadable content to smart devices for years. Again, like the limited-downloads issues we highlighted above, this is one of those in-the-fine-print scenarios that we didn’t encounter in the wild.In November of 2016, Netflix rolled out one of the features its fan base had been demanding since the company exploded in popularity all those years ago. Unfortunately, there’s really no way to tell which titles have which limitations unless you experiment with them ahead of time, so if your goal is to download all the episodes of Frasier for that Arctic cruise, it might be wise to test things out a few weeks before you set sail.
Some titles will also expire 48 hours after you first press play (this is also displayed in the “My Downloads” section).įortunately, if the particular title is available for renewal per the licensing, you don’t have to download it again-you just have to tap the little “!” icon next to it in “My Downloads” and renew it (while online of course). If a title is set to expire from your download collection in the next 7 days or less, you will see a notification to that end on your “My Downloads” page within the Netflix app.
Per the fine print in Netflix’s help file on the matter, titles can expire per the license agreement with the companies leasing the content to Netflix. Titles Expire, and You Need to Log In Occasionally We tried to run into this barrier with show after show, but have yet to run into a limit. That means it’s theoretically possible that you could run into a situation where you wanted to download all 6 seasons of a show but Netflix would only allow you to download some of them. Netflix negotiates different agreements with all the different companies it licences content from, and those agreements can impact how much content from a given company you can download at once.Īlthough we have yet to run into this issue while field testing the download feature, we talked to Netflix and found that it’s possible company X could cap the number of episodes you download of show A. The second, and not immediately obvious limit, has to do with licensing issues. Licensing Agreements Can Limit Your Downloads That one’s not on Netflix, though-we should have bought a tablet with more storage.
While you can always check the storage on your device using the built-in OS tools, you can also easily check the storage right from the Neflix app’s Settings menu, which has the added bonus of immediately showing you how much of the storage is chewed up by Netflix’s offline storage (dark gray is spaced used by non-Netflix sources, blue is used by Netflix, and light gray is free space).Īmong all the limitations of the new offline viewing feature, this is the only one that actually posed any real immediate threat to offline viewing in our tests. You can increase how much you can download by opting to download in standard definition instead of high definition (which will save you ~50% in storage consumption). You can only store what you have space for, so a tablet with 64GB of internal storage is far better suited for this task than a tablet with only 8GB of internal storage. The first and most obvious limit is the physical limitations of your device.
RELATED: How to Download Movies and Shows From Netflix for Offline Viewing If you’re poised and ready to load up your device for a trip, you’ll be relieved to hear there is only really one immediate limit on how much you can download (and two minor ones).