Netflix, which began offering offline viewing of its TV shows and movies on mobile devices last fall, expanded the feature on Monday to its Windows 10 app.
The new offering, spotted by Windows Central, gives Netflix an advantage over the competing Amazon Video, which has long allowed offline viewing for Prime members, but only for Android, iOS, and Amazon Fire devices.
How useful offline viewing is to you, of course, will depend largely on whether Netflix has an agreement with the owner of the content you want to watch. As Windows Central notes, the offline selection on Windows is mostly limited to Netflix originals—a large collection of blockbuster content, to be sure, but far from Netflix's entire library available for streaming.
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Similar to the Netflix mobile app, the Windows 10 app now lets you check all the downloadable content by clicking the "Available for Download" option in the left-hand menu.
Even though content providers will likely be slow to get on board, adding offline viewing for PCs is in line with Netflix's goals for the feature when it was originally announced in November. At the time, the company said its research showed that customers wanted the ability to watch shows and movies where internet access is slow or expensive, such as on an airplane.
Situations like those make laptops an ideal choice for offline playback, especially on a very long flight where power outlets are plentiful and the amount of videos you have time to watch exceeds the storage capacity of your phone or tablet. Meanwhile, back on solid ground, the rise of data exemptions like T-Mobile's Binge On coupled with improving mobile networks means that the use case for downloading shows to your phone or tablet for viewing is less clear.