Yes, this! Not everyone *can* stream at acceptable quality, and it sorta destroys the viewing experience when it pauses, pixelates, etc.
There are several reasons that I use youtube-dl, ordered by increasing importance (or at least frequency of importance):
- Watch even if they yank it
- Easily find the video later
- Watch when I have *no* Internet connection
- See just the video, no distracting garbage
- Save bandwidth by not re-downloading for each view
- Watch full quality, and without glitches
This caching doesn't address the first 4 -- and YT will never want to fix 3 of them -- but it does attempt to solve the last 2 (if it actually lets you choose your quality), which are the most important to me and the main reason that I use a downloaded in the first place. (Also why my VERY non-technical daughter has a desktop shortcut to a custom script that uses yt-download.)
I can't believe it took them so long to come up w/ this; it seems like a no brainer: greatly extend your product's reach and usability, and lose virtually nothing!
(Overall bandwidth's kind of a wash; it only saves bytes if you re-watch on the same machine/browser, and people will download higher-resolution versions than would have been streamed real-time, costing more bandwidth.)