Hi and thanks for the question here. The answer is fairly simple. When we started working on these new apps one area that was a big focus was around downloads. Why? It is because downloads have been a pain point for a while for many users. There was also some underlying tech in our downloads stack that was very challenging and problematic.
The truth is - we didn’t “remove” anything here. Well, I guess you could argue that we removed everything… but let me try and explain a little bit.
As we were going through this process around the new apps a decision was made to rebuild downloads altogether from the ground up (without the main tech that was causing a lot of the pain points for everyone). So the quick answer here is that this part of downloads hasn’t been built yet - but it is coming. The initial goal was to get basic downloading super fast, responsive, and on a solid foundation then start to build out functionality. We are already onto the latter parts of this effort and have recently worked on downloading groups of titles like an entire season. Other “groupings” downloading (i.e. playlists) is coming along with more “smart downloads” like your device being smart enough to not only remove something on device after watching but also queue up the next episode or two to download in the background for you automatically.
We are looking to provide more context and more technical information in a communication like a blog post here before long to explain this a bit better, so keep an eye out for this sometime this summer.
