Hey, Google and Amazon, can we ask you to play nice with each other? While they are of course competitors on some fronts, they also have products that need each other. That’s why when they’re not on good terms, it’s the consumer that eventually suffers. It seems that Google has pulled out YouTube from the Amazon Echo Show device and if you ask Alexa to play a video from YouTube, you get this message: “Currently, Google is not supporting Youtube on Echo Show.”
The whole point of having an Echo Show, Amazon’s Alexa-enabled speaker with a screen, is to be able to play videos on it. And we all know what is the biggest video sharing player around (it’s YouTube, if you didn’t get it yet). So not having YouTube available is pretty annoying and maybe even pointless. Amazon’s official statement says that there is no technical reason why it should not be available and that Google pulled out its service without explanation and without notifying their consumers.
Google however says that they have been “in negotiations” with Amazon for some time now and that how they implemented YouTube on the Echo Show “violates” their terms of service. It’s no big secret that Google is very particular about how other companies display YouTube on their apps or devices and their terms of service on its API is extensive on that matter. They say that they hope to “reach an agreement and resolve these issues soon.”
But it’s also no secret that Google is pushing its Google Home smart speaker as a major competitor to Amazon Echo devices. But Home doesn’t have a screen, but you can use it to stream your videos to your smart TV screen. Again, at the end of the day, it’s the consumer that suffers from all this push and pull, so hopefully, they do resolve this soon.
VIA: The Verge
Maybe once Amazon starts allowing the selling of chromecasts in its online site and starts supporting Chromecast from Amazon video and starts allowing the Google play store on its tablets Google will come around.
Amazon is the asshole historically.