Sorry, Frequent Flyers: 'New Windows App Experience' for Netflix Ditches Downloads

What Netflix bills as a coming attraction for PC users will also deliver a feature retraction: Its new Windows app won't download videos for offline viewing.

The streaming service is breaking this news to users in a dialog in the current Windows app titled “Coming soon: A new Windows app experience.” 

“The update includes access to live events, compatibility with ad-supported plans, and more!” it says. “Downloads will no longer be supported, but you can continue to watch TV shows and movies offline on a supported mobile device.”

Subscribers who travel with any frequency should be forgiven for looking askance at the dialog’s “OK” button because this is not okay if you regularly take a laptop to places with low or no bandwidth.

The obvious use case is on airplanes, where inflight Wi-Fi (Starlink excepted) usually isn’t reliably fast enough for streaming TV shows or movies and generally costs extra. But the free Wi-Fi on Amtrak, even along the Northeast Corridor, is also likely to stumble at streaming. And lodging Wi-Fi isn’t always a sure bet either.

Netflix’s response to questions—starting with “What’s the reason for removing this feature?” and ending with “For how long will people be able to use the old app?”—did not come with an attributable name attached but also didn’t go beyond that dialog’s talking points except to report that the new app is rolling out now. 

You can still download TV shows and movies on Netflix’s phone and tablet apps. But unless you travel with an iPad or Android tablet instead of or alongside a laptop, this change will leave your offline viewing confined to the much smaller dimensions of your phone’s display. 

Which isn’t great, especially with longer content, as I was reminded while watching a downloaded rental of Swingers on my phone on a flight back from Southern California. This downgrade is the functional equivalent of a streaming-music app like Spotify saying you can’t listen to music through speakers better than those on your laptop.

The addition of DisplayPort video output on Pixel 8-series devices in Google’s latest Pixel feature drop doesn’t seem to offer a workaround. When we ran a USB-C cable from a Pixel 8a to a laptop’s Thunderbolt port, Netflix video didn’t work while YouTube did, which suggests restraints coded into the Netflix app.

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Unfortunately, Netflix is only lowering itself to the level of most competing video streaming services: Disney+, Google TV, Hulu, Max, Paramount+, and Peacock all reserve download support for mobile apps. (A Disney tech-support note categorizes Windows laptops as “mobile devices,” but that service’s Windows app, essentially a boxed version of Microsoft Edge, only does streaming.) And while Apple TV+ supports downloads to laptops, that’s a Mac-only proposition.  

Meanwhile, Amazon’s Prime Video app for Windows still supports downloads for offline viewing. Why Netflix would intentionally make its service functionally worse than its closest competitor is a mystery as tangled as anything you can watch on the service.

Eric Zeman contributed to this report.