Own an Android phone and don't want to get interrupted while watching a video on Youtube? It irritates all of us when the video takes a lot of time to download. But now there's a solution for it - Opera Mini for Android has fixed this problem.
Users will see less of the video-buffering wheel as the unique 'video boost' feature arrives today in the Opera Mini mobile browser, and this is available for free in Google Play Store. The release brings smoother video viewing and data savings to almost 120 million users on Opera Mini for Android, Opera’s biggest user base. Opera has been the first company to integrate video optimization into a web browser. The default web browsers on Android do not reduce the size of video data.
Buffering delays and stalled video cause frustration among users and eat up the data plan – congestion in networks also adds to frustration and time wastage. The benefits of Opera’s video boost technology include reduced size of video data to resulting in less video loading time, reduced buffering delays and extended life of mobile data plan.
“In India, about 70% of smartphone users stream videos on their mobile phones often resulting in poor viewing experience due to stalled videos, exhaustion of data plans, time wastage and frustration. Opera Mini for Android comes to the rescue with its ‘video boost’ feature which makes the video sizes smaller resulting in savings in streaming time and data plans. If you love to watch videos on your Android device but hate getting surprises on your data bill, it’s time to switch browsers,” says Sunil Kamath, Vice President - South Asia & South East Asia at Opera.
The latest version of Opera Mini for Android brings more speed, savings and efficiency features:
In high-savings mode, Opera Mini will automatically turn off data compression when it detects Wi-Fi to take full advantage of the high-quality internet connection. In case it discovers Wi-Fi to be crowded, it simply turns data savings back on under the savings summary.
Opera Mini now lets you re-size the images in the browser before uploading them to the web. Re-scaling an image reduces the file size so that you can save data and increase the success rate for uploads on poor networks.
With the new thumb-scroller feature, scroll down to bring up a side scroll bar on the screen for easier navigation on long articles and webpages.
Better video viewing experience is the need of hour
With the trend of video viewing on mobile phones is gaining traction globally, ‘video boost’ feature will help meeting this demand in a satisfactory manner. As per a 2015 study by Conviva, the online viewers have a little patience while watching videos on mobiles – about 75% of them abandon poor-quality videos in less than 4 minutes and and 33% within 30 seconds. Interactive Advertising Bureau research found that video buffering speed is among the top three most important attributes for video viewers on smartphones.
How to do it?
You simply need to tap the savings summary under the "O" menu in Opera Mini 15 to change to high-savings mode. Just below that, tick the box beside video boost to switch on smoother viewing. The video boost feature also shows a count which users can use to keep track of videos that have been optimized.