Should we make Udemy lectures downloadable?

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#1

Before you vote, here’s how I see the pros and cons of making Udemy lecture’s downloadable as .mp4…

Pros

  • Can consume offline / with bad connection.
  • No need for an iOS or Android device (1)
  • Can use a player of your choice.
  • You feel you really own the content.

(1) Note you can already download for offline use on the Udemy mobile app.

Cons

  • You won’t get automatic updates, and we make a lot of updates (2).
  • There’s no convenient way to download many lectures.
  • Having “loose” .mp4 files around will increase piracy.
  • Taking the course off Udemy makes it harder to access Q&A & resources.
  • You won’t get close captions.

(2) This is my personal major concern. Quality and consistency is very important to us.

So, cast your vote, should we enable downloads on the Udemy website or not?

  • Yes
  • No

0 voters

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Thank you!

PS This is also posted to all three major Facebook groups: Unity, Blender and Unreal.

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Download videos offline
#2

@Michael_Bridges thanks for relaying this request and getting this going.

#3

Another thing I should add is we plan to start hosing our content on Teachable under a membership as an alternative later this year.

#4

I would not like to see an increase in the amount of piracy of the video content, whilst this obviously hurts your business model, I believe it also hurts the students who have paid for it and, in many cases provide fantastic support through-out the community. I think it would leave a fairly bad taste in anyone’s mouth who gave up their time believing they were helping a fellow student only to find out that they had in fact invested their time, for free, to help someone who had been dishonest in their obtaining the course materials. It would become increasingly more challenging to tell who were students and who were not.

I personally would prefer to see leverage placed upon Udemy to make an increased effort to resolve the issue. Presumably, it wouldn’t be in Udemy’s interests should you be under pressure to resolve the issue for your students by relocating the course to another provider? You are after all a customer of theirs and whilst it would not be a small step to migrate to another provider, it wouldn’t be impossible either, whether this was another 3rd party provider, or a home grown one.

Updated Thu Jan 19 2017 18:33

Incidentally, I wouldn’t be surprised if you see a much higher percentage of Yes votes on the the Facebook groups, based on the fact that you have a considerably higher quantity of non-students there.

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#5

I think the piracy rate would go way up and we would lose potential students. I think keeping it as it is works just fine!

2 Likes
#6

I agree with @Rob and @EricPhillips on this as they have pretty much covered what i would have posted as well.
I understand the reasoning of it as people with issue on the Udemy site might vote yes but these days who doesnt have a device to access them via the app and download that way.
Looking at it from a business perspective Gamedev.tv is a client of Udemy and if Udemy is not delivering the service it is they that need to resolve the issue not the customer or lose (Haha i nearly typed loose there) said customer.

If you wanted to attract more people to the courses then why not do a few mini courses (similar to whats on the you tube channel already) and add to the end of it “If you want to learn more about unity/unreal/blender then try any of these courses”.

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#7

I just wanted to add that by suggesting to not allow the downloading, doesn’t mean that I am sitting on a high perch and saying “well it works ok for me” etc, as I have found on a few occasions that it has been stuttery and not workable. It is frustrating, so I can understand how people who are being plagued with this feel.

However, the responsibility for fixing the issue lies with Udemy, an acknowledgement of the issue and log of on-going attempts to resolve it would most likely be appreciated by those that are effected by it, especially if this indicated that specific changes had made improvements for various users. The webpage instructing to clear temporary internet files/cache, can help on occasion, but equally feels like the response you would get from an ISP when you report problems with your internet access and they ask you to reboot your router. Stock answers can feel incredibly dismissive.

Form a customer of GameDev.tv’s perspective - If I had just bought a course and didn’t know of the separation between hosting platform and GameDev.tv as businesses, hadn’t been involved in the community for very long and these issues were my first impression, I may not really care that much about who’s issue this was, and consider the issue/fault/blame to lay with those that I had paid my money to. “I want it to just work, I don’t care how it works.” etc. (same with my router!)

As such, I do feel that GameDev.tv have a responsibility to their students and should be continuing to pressure Udemy’s hand into resolving and perhaps being able to see some feedback on this would also be useful/reassuring. I would hope that the quantity of students, the quality of courses, and what I can only assume is a fairly strong relationship with Udemy would only add additional weight to any suggestion of “we may have to look at alternative platforms”.

Looking for alternative, temporary, solutions is not to be frowned upon and does demonstrate GameDev.tv’s commitment to their students (I don’t believe this has ever been in question to be fair), but I would hate for this to create an untenable business scenario which threatened the support of existing courses, or, the future of more high quality courses being developed, as well as obviously the livelihoods of our fab instructors.

4 Likes
#8

Needed to add this as i posted it on facebook

The only option that i would consider video downloads would be a custom player that you could only get from gamedev.tv on purchasing the course and you get a code that can only be used once.
This is complicated and a pain to do but also would only temporarily restrict the piracy issue before they found a way around it. Hence why i vote no.

Thinking ahead as well, Having people on different updates on the courses will make it very had to be consistant with Q&A and on the forums due to different people having different variations of the course from the downloaded content.
It just creates more work accross the board too!

I again understand those with poor connections and the udemy player bugging out sometimes but i dont think making them downloadable is the solution.

2 Likes
#9

tl;dr Thanks for even considering this. My humble opinion is yes, eventually.

This is a huge decision, and I am very grateful the team is considering this seriously. Here are my two cents:

First things first, room, meet elephant. For the most part, it is an irreversible decision. Here are the three things I think the decision hinges on. Everything else, people can choose to enjoy in whichever format they prefer.

  1. Should you release a ‘feature incomplete’ course for download?
  2. How much will piracy affect future sales?
  3. How much blowback will there be from customers who have already paid full price for the course?

Taking those into consideration, my suggestion is to keep it on Udemy for the time being. Work on the updates you think would make a complete package (I already think it is, and have gotten my money’s worth).

When this is done in a few months, you can make it downloadable, and reduce the regular price of the course. I think this makes sense even from a business perspective.

  • People who have paid full price for the course don’t feel like they have gotten the short end of the stick
  • People who have paid for the course get all the benefits of having it downloadable (working on planes for me!)
  • People who pirate the course were not likely to buy your course anyway, but after going through the course and if they’ve found a lot of value from, are instead more likely to purchase a different one in the future.

P.S. Personal anecdote, I really appreciate the updates and the work the team have put in to make it as user friendly as possible. I also recognize that this is above and beyond what should be the case as compared to doing a course in meatspace. I’m already getting cost and time benefits (no commute yay!), should I be expecting the course to be permanently updated too? Not for me. If, for example, a new version of Unity comes out, and I felt that I needed guidance (and am unable to figure it out from the docs). I’d be more than happy to pay for a new course instead of being angry the old one wasn’t updated to reflect that. The team does good and hard work, and should be rewarded for it.

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#10

I would like to add a resounding “no!” to allowing downloads. You should get paid for everything you do, and I think allowing downloads would increase piracy to the point it may hurt you guys. In addition, taking it out of context, with the Q&A and community and such, would lessen it a bit.

If Udemy all of a sudden decided they were shutting down, THEN I could see allowing students to download ca Brent so they wouldn’t lose it, but otherwise, keep it where it belongs!

2 Likes
#11

How about disc and/or usb formats?
They’re a tangible way to relay, store and own the courses offline. There are also ways to delay piracy by storing the videos under certain formats. Of course, any pirate worth their salt can steal videos (streaming or stored), that’s a fact of this cyber arms race of ours.

I haven’t had much of a problem streaming videos into my laptop and, though I did download the Udemy app, I never use it because the screen is too small to follow the cursor.

Quite frankly, I prefer to have your courses in the cloud, where I can reliably stream an updated copy anywhere, anytime in civilized society.

I have personally discovered through painful experience that my skills as a Digital Artist have no use in places where the Internet is considered a rare rich kid’s toy. I am not very likely to stray away from the Matrix, so I am not that worried about offline access.

#12

Distribution / shipping would be a nightmare and costly. Very easy to copy. Student’s personal details would have to be stored (address etc), thus data protection. I think this would be a costly and risky exercise personally.

Good to hear your experiences have been positive though - nice to hear you will remain plugged into the Matrix Neon.urbanite :wink:

2 Likes
#13

They already are…

https://pypi.python.org/pypi/udemy-dl

Also in the mobile app they can be downloaded natively.

#14

As someone who tries to help out people on the Unity side, it would introduce another layer of complexity to have to ask “are you viewing the latest version of the lecture?”. The updates factor is the killer for me.

I voted no. The fact that you’re asking should be a big issue for Udemy - their performance issues are a problem for them to solve.

3 Likes
#15

@ninjachimp points to the core, I think. The problem is the performance on Udemy’s part. With regards to offline access, it is something Udemy could integrate in their apps for iOS/Android, e.g. in the same way Spotify does for music (require online connections, max storage time, could also be max storage data size etc). For PC’s and Macs, the main problem is the web video player, which hogs resources with the appetite of a black hole.

That being said, I would consider buying a set of videos for download. But then I’m also getting old, I guess :smiley:

1 Like
#16

No it is, however we will…

  1. Make it clearer you can watch offline with Udemy mobile ops.

  2. Move towards co-hosting our new courses on Teachable.

2 Likes
#17

If the content is already available to Android/iOS users, why should everyone else not be allowed to access the same content? I don’t have (nor will I ever have) these portable devices and if I did, the service provider charges for downloading this much stuff would make it very expensive and an added cost over and above the cost of the course itself - a double whammy.

I understand that piracy may be of some concern, but I understand that there are already pirate copies out there so that argument does not really hold water. Anything delivered in digital form can be pirated - it’s just a matter of how badly you want it. I bought this course and have a very dubious internet connection which makes watching ANY steamed video haphazard at best and impossible at worst. Why should I be denied access to it because I have a PC instead of a phone?

But for me - the resounding and most important point is that it’s already available to SOME people, but not ALL like it should be.

/end rant

#18

I am sorry to say but taking a course like this with anyone on Udemy will give you the same results.
Its not GameDev.TV i think that prevent you from downloading from Udemy via PC it is the way their system works.
This is not Udemy they are the hosting platform for the course so thus we have no control over what they do we can only ask.
I did explain to you over on the discord chat this and i can understand your frustration but that is the nature of the way Udemy is set up.
The restriction here isnt us its your ISP and tbh i would be screaming at them if you cant watch a streamed video as thats horrible service in my opinion.

I think NinjaChimp sums it up nicely it would create us student instructors a MASSIVE workload increase if people are watching an outdated lecture then we have to find out which lecture version they were watching. Not only is this a lot more work for us but it lowers the effectiveness of the Q&A support even if it was made that we chose to support the outdated lectures.

I can appreciate the situation but i dont think there is anything we can do to help which sucks cos i like helping people to achieve :frowning:

#19

Maybe i’m missing something, but why do Android and iOS users get access to download the files but nobody else does?
Yes, my ISP is a problem and believe me i have screamed at them for over a year but i’m one of the (un)lucky ones who have very very limited choice when it comes to ISPs and they know it and exploit it.

This Udemy app thingo - I don’t use these mobile devices, never have and prolly never will but I can’t understand why the download link used by the app can’t be given to non-app users? Is it because the app cost money and they would lose by letting PC users download the exact same files via some other means?

In my case i was lucky enough to buy the course via a coupon, so it didn’t cost me the 100’s of dollars that is the normal price. If I had paid full price, i would be more than just disappointed and frustrated - i’d be furious.

As for monitoring updated content - Wouldn’t it be possible to utilize a simple (or elaborate) naming convention which clearly indicates what “version” of the video everyone is talking about - a source control system for videos. Seems pretty easy to me, but i may not be seeing the whole picture. A simple prefix like v15.0 or v15.1 to indicate the original video content (x.0) and the newer one (x.1).

I dunno, it all makes little sense to me as it is.

#20

Xennon i have a friend that lives the other end of the high street from me and the road he is on had broadband but just not his block of flats :confused: so i do understand your frustration as he tries to stream with sometimes a 600kbs upstream :confused:
To be honest i can post guesses and conjectures as to the way things work but honestly i am not in the gamedev office nor do i work for Udemy so really anything are best guesses and my own opinion.
Personally i believe the more open you make your product the easier it is for people to pirate.
I think its probably best that i let you get an official response as i dont want to give you any false information :slight_smile:

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