Reliance Jio’s JioCinema Adds Smart Download Option: What Is It and How Can You Use It?

Ever since its launch, Reliance Jio has been offering free data usage, and will continue to do so until at least March 31 under the Happy New Year offer. The catch is that the Reliance Jio Happy New Year offer has a 1GB per day data transfer limit. This is not a problem for most usage, but if you're using Reliance Jio to watch videos online, then you might use up the limit pretty quickly.

Reliance Jio's video on demand service JioCinema, formerly JioOnDemand, has a pretty good collection of movies available to watch, and it also added a feature allowing you to download films to watch later, but the catch is that a typical movie such as Bajirao Mastani comes up to 985MB on the medium quality setting, and 1.91GB on high quality. This means that if you are trying to watch at even the medium setting, almost your entire data quota of the day gets used up in downloading this one movie.

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To solve this problem, Reliance Jio has added another new feature to JioCinema called Smart Download. This schedules the download to take place overnight, between 2am and 5am. That's the "happy hours" present in every Reliance Jio plan, under which there are no limits on data usage, and all usage is free. Even after Reliance Jio's full commercial launch when you'll have to pay for data, usage during this three hour window is meant to be free and unlimited as per the tariffs announced by Reliance Jio earlier.

This means that you could download an entire movie while you sleep, and this would not count against the Reliance Jio Happy New Year offer free data quota you can use right now, or use up your paid data (once Reliance Jio starts charging users). You can queue up more than one download at a time, and then check on progress by opening Reliance Jio's My Downloads tab. The JioCinema app shows you how much disk space you have remaining so you'll know if you need to clear up anything.

It's worth pointing out that not all films and shows streaming on Reliance Jio JioCinema are also available for download. You can however tap the menu button on the top left, and choose Available for Download to see a list of the movies you can download. This includes the Eros Now catalogue, and also popular English movies such as John Wick.

Last year, Reliance Jio competitor Airtel announced a Happy Hours offering for prepaid customers, between 3am and 5am, where it would offer 50 percent data back to users for all in-app data usage taking place in that window. This is available to all apps through a free API, and all Airtel customers get this benefit without having to opt-in. YouTube has integrated the option in its app. In order to access this feature, all that an Airtel prepaid customer needs to do inside YouTube app is choose the Smart Offline option on their chosen video and select 'Save overnight with Airtel Happy Hours'.