People binge-watching a TV series could certainly anticipate their near-future media demands and download the series through means other than cellular networks. Downloading video and storing it on flash memory could eliminate a huge chunk of the demand for streamed video.

Streaming is just downloading in order. Data downloads while I watch/listen. That's super convenient. That's the big advantage of streaming. Keeping that data or dumping that data is a different issue.

Streaming is downloading, but without the timeshifting properties you get from storing the media to flash. With properly downloadable media, you can download in the evening, on your wired residential connection, and watch during the day when you only have a cellular connection.

Conventional downloading methods do not order the packets. So you can watch/listen during the downloading process.

They could, but...they don't want to. So they won't!

You don't know that. Currently consumers don't have the (legal) option, so extrapolating their current behavior to their potential desires is fallacious.

I download entire seasons of TV series with my Android Netflix client all the time. It's fantastic for travel.

I could've been doing this with iTunes for TV shows for years.

It would be way less convenient, though. So I don't. I don't know which device I'll end up watching on, and don't want to deal with syncing and all that shit.

> iTunes for TV shows for years.

Which is way more expensive than streaming services. Prohibitively so for wide swaths of the general population who don't have tech industry salaries. The cost of one TV show from iTunes can approach the price of several months of Netflix.

With copyright reform, that needn't be the case.

(Note that for many consumers, Netflix is already considered too expensive. Several people sharing the cost of one account is pretty common from what I've seen.)

Netflix and Amazon Prime Video already offer the ability to download and play later, so there is no need to extrapolate, and we do know that.

As I understand it, those features come with considerable DRM limitations. So no, it's really not the same.

They don't come with any practical limitations, so it is really the same.

Netflix has downloads.

Alright, so I should just download a significant portion of YouTube and news websites because I may want to watch those videos randomly? Or I have to wait to get home. Unless we're talking about terabytes of storage on my phone, I don't think this is feasible (for all the video and music I could want at a given time).

Fact is that streaming is just convenient. Like really convenient. I wish there was more stuff that I could download and listen to offline, but it's naive to suggest that streaming has no advantages. We stream while data connected because we download things in an ordered manner (vs how normal downloading is done). That's nice that I don't have to wait for a full movie or song to be completely downloaded to listen to it.

Is there any particular reason why your phone or laptop couldn't opportunistically download all the latest videos from your YouTube subscriptions on WiFi while you sleep?

Maybe you don't subscribe to channels and the system could never anticipate your whims and desires... but I wager it would work great for most users.

I subscribe to a lot of things but I'm not quite sold on the predictive algorithms. Mostly because the recommendations I get aren't really what I want. I have this problem with YouTube, Netflix (which used to be spot on), Spotify, and prime. So I'm not sure if I really trust their prediction models.