Once again, YouTube is pulling off away from Amazon. This isn’t the first time as you may remember, Google has stopped supporting YouTube on Echo Show back in September. The video app reappeared last month after some negotiation. Pulling out YouTube programming from the Echo Show was an unfortunate situation, leaving the users with not much desirable content to enjoy but good thing Amazon thought of redirecting to the web version of YouTube.
YouTube recently announced that it will stop supporting not just the Echo Show but also the Fire TV. By doing that, owners of the two products will only have limited videos to watch. YouTube currently has the biggest gallery of videos with probably millions of clips and movies. With it not appearing on the Echo Show or Fire TV will mean the two won’t be as useful. You see, the point of having a media device is to stream videos. There may still be other sources but it’s YouTube we’re talking about.
Amazon’s response to the first problem was to pull out Google products. You will no longer see Google Home, Chromecast, or Nest Thermostat on Amazon. The top e-commerce site stopped selling those Google Products and so the tech giant decided to respond by stopping support for an Amazon device.
A spokesperson from YouTube shared this statement: ” We’ve been trying to reach agreement with Amazon to give consumers access to each other’s products and services. But Amazon doesn’t carry Google products like Chromecast and Google Home, doesn’t make Prime Video available for Google Cast users, and last month stopped selling some of Nest’s latest products. Given this lack of reciprocity, we are no longer supporting YouTube on Echo Show and FireTV. We hope we can reach an agreement to resolve these issues soon.”
Both Fire TV and Echo Show will no longer be able to play YouTube videos. The service will end on the last day of December. By January 1, 2018, sorry, but you can’t play videos on YouTube on your device unless the two companies make peace with each other.
Interestingly, Amazon has reached out to us with the following statement:
Echo Show and Fire TV now display a standard web view of YouTube.com and point customers directly to YouTube’s existing website. Google is setting a disappointing precedent by selectively blocking customer access to an open website. We hope to resolve this with Google as soon as possible.
We’ll see how this drama unfolds.
VIA: The Verge
How I felt when Amazon pulled Prime Video from Android a couple of years ago: “Amazon is setting a disappointing precedent by selectively blocking customer access to Prime Video content.”