Millions of users celebrated when Netflix finally announced its support for offline mode, easing the pressure on unstable connections and draconian data plans. However, in recent days some people have discovered the dark side of that feature: a good portion of the content has a limited number of downloads, and once that quota is used up, that episode or movie cannot be downloaded again for a year. Obviously, playback will continue to work via traditional streaming, and deep down we can't blame Netflix for this limit, but the decision to hide it is, to say the least, questionable.
A Hidden Annual Limit
Offline playback was one of the biggest debts Netflix had with its users. The offline playback helps us enjoy our favorite series and movies with greater stability, and the peace of mind of knowing we're not devouring data in the background. Yet the offline mode has a couple of blemishes. At first, downloads could only be stored on the internal memory of mobile devices. Later, support for external cards was added, but it's not very complete on Android, to say the least. And on top of all that, downloads have an expiration date (the minimum duration is 48 hours), so they need to be refreshed. Now another irritation has been added for users: annual download limit.
Unfortunately, we don't have many technical details, because the limit was discovered the hard way: users receive the warning only when they are about to exhaust their quota. The folks at Android Police estimate that the available number of downloads is not very large, perhaps four or five per movie/episode, and anyone who tries to go beyond that will get an error 10016-22006. The problem is concentrated on the obligation to refresh content. Every time we do so, we lose one of those valuable downloads, and the lack of feedback on the matter makes the situation worse.
What's Behind the Limit?
I imagine the download limit is the result of a compromise between Netflix and the original content owners. Internal productions (Stranger Things, Orange is the New Black, etc.) will surely have much more relaxed parameters, and I understand that the alternative is to remove the offline mode entirely, but users must sacrifice something again (in this case, convenience) to appease the copyright hawks. We hope Netflix will inform and expand the download count as appropriate.
Android Police
