Late last year, Netflix announced it was making it possible to download video content to a mobile device for watching when an internet connection was slow or unavailable. However, not every program in the company’s catalog is currently available for offline viewing.
To see what shows you can temporarily take with you, open the Netflix app on your Android or iOS device, tap the menu button in the upper-left corner of the main screen and select “Available for Download” from the menu. The download offerings will vary, but you can find many popular television shows and Netflix’s own original productions — like “House of Cards,” “Orange Is the New Black,” “Master of None,” “The Crown” and “Stranger Things.”
The amount of space a downloaded video takes up depends on the length of the program and the picture quality you have chosen in your Netflix app settings. For example, a 48-minute episode of “Stranger Things” downloaded in standard quality takes up about 197 megabytes of space on an iPad, (roughly about 68 full-resolution photographs taken with a 10-megapixel camera) while the same episode downloaded at the higher quality setting uses about 310 megabytes of space. When you are finished watching, you can delete the show from the My Downloads menu in the Netflix app; the menu also shows how long you have to watch each download before it expires.
Netflix notes that certain Android devices are “not compatible with the download feature” because of the wide variety of phones and tablets that run Google’s operating system, and not all models support high-definition playback. Your device needs to be running at least Android 4.4.2 or later to download shows from Netflix; Apple users need devices running iOS 8 or later. The number of different devices on which you can download files depends on your Netflix streaming plan, but you can use up to four mobile gadgets with the top-tier Netflix Premium plan.