Key Takeaways
If you use streaming apps from Netflix or YouTube on a phone or tablet, you can download video content to watch when there's no internet. However, on streaming boxes such as Apple TV, Android TV, and Google TV systems, you can only stream that content. The presumption is that you always have internet, but even so, there are reasons to want a download option here too.
Why Mobile Downloads but Nothing at Home?
I have found it somewhat baffling that streaming apps on smart TVs and smart streaming boxes don't also allow you to download content like their mobile app versions do. This has been one of my favorite features on my iPad and smartphone, but perhaps these companies have just never considered that we might have some uses for this function. That's OK, everyone makes mistakes, but I can think of more than a few good reasons to give us the same flexibility at home as we get on the road.
Device Storage Is Bigger Than Ever
One argument I've heard is that smart TVs and these smart streaming boxes don't have enough onboard storage to allow for downloads anyway. To that I say you can now buy a 128GB Apple TV, and Android streaming devices usually support USB storage devices. Besides, I'm the one who bought the device, surely I should get to decide if I want to use that space for media storage!
As for smart TVs, most of them have truly tiny internal storage, but they also generally have USB ports so you can watch media directly from a flash drive or hard drive, so again, adding storage would be totally feasible.
Downloads Overcome Streaming Quality and Performance Issues
I have really fast and reliably gigabit internet at home, but even so, I still frequently have fluctuating streaming quality while watching shows and movies. It's just the nature of the internet that conditions are always changing. If I want to watch a movie with consistent quality, I need to download it beforehand. Ironically, for someone with fast internet, downloading stuff before watching it makes way more sense than someone with a slow internet connection. Since I can download a movie in a minute or two.
It could also be a way to overcome the maximum quality available on streaming, since a less compressed version could be an option for downloads. I'd like this in particular for when I buy movies on services like Apple TV. I'd like something more comparable to a Blu-Ray than a murky 4K stream.
While internet outages are rare these days, they aren't rare enough not to affect me from time to time. On my mobile devices, I've always loved smart download features, where a streaming app will preload the next few episodes of whatever you're watching, so if you unexpectedly don't have an adequate internet connection, you can still keep going.
This sort of preloading feature on home streaming boxes and TVs would be great, almost like a prescient TiVo. So, even if something goes wrong with your local internet connection, your ISP, or the streaming service itself, you might not even notice.
Piracy Is Irrelevant
Personally, I think part of the reason that streaming providers are hesitant about letting us download stuff on our home-based streaming devices has more to do with piracy than anything else. However, all of their shows are already being pirated, and each show only has to be pirated once. Which means that allowing downloads on home-based hardware alongside phones won't actually change anything, other than giving their paying customers a new useful feature.