If you use WhatsApp, there’s a good chance that you’ve sent and received your fair share of photos and videos. Photos aren’t that big because WhatsApp compresses them. Videos on the other hand do take a little longer to download, but it seems that over in India, WhatsApp could be testing out a new feature for videos.
According to The Android Soul, WhatsApp is apparently testing out a video streaming feature. Basically when you receive a video, you get the option of either downloading it to your phone, or as you can see in the screenshot above, you also get the option of being able to stream it instead, meaning that you won’t need to wait for the video to fully download in order to watch it.
We’re not sure what benefits there are to this since we’re not 100% sure about how the feature works. It is possible that by streaming it you can save space on your phone as it won’t download the entire video, which could be preferable by users who might have limited amounts of storage or who can’t be bothered to download the whole thing.
Also for now the feature seems to be tested in India and we’re not sure if this will be an exclusive feature for the country, or if it will find its way to other markets. In the past we have seen how some apps and developers have chosen to create features that are aimed at markets where the internet is slow or not as reliable.