Google once again blocks YouTube from the Amazon Echo Show

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Back in late September, Google pulled YouTube from the Amazon Echo Show. The latter is the smart speaker that features a 7-inch screen, and Google's streaming video site had proven to be quite popular on the Echo Show. At the time, Google stated that the use of YouTube on the Amazon Echo Show "violates our terms of service, creating a broken user experience. We hope to be able to reach an agreement and resolve these issues soon."

What Google was referring to was Amazon's decision not to offer two features on the Echo Show's version of YouTube that are available everywhere else. Those two features are autoplay and the ability to subscribe to channels. With the former, users can sit back and watch as each completed video leads to another related one that starts automatically. The latter allows users to follow the YouTube channel belonging to a certain content provider on YouTube, whether it is a company or individual, and be alerted when there is a new video from that channel.

When Google first pulled YouTube from the Echo Show, Amazon got some measure of revenge by no longer selling the Nest E Thermostat, Nest’s Camera IQ, and the Nest Secure alarm system. Google and Nest are separate firms both owned by corporate behemoth Alphabet.

A couple of weeks ago, Echo Show users were told to use the web version of YouTube as a workaround, once again bringing the application back to the smart speaker. But this was not an ideal situation since the web version didn't mesh well with the Echo Show's UI. And yesterday afternoon, Google once again pulled YouTube from the Amazon Echo Show by blocking the device from showing the web version of the app. A ban on YouTube for Fire TV was added for good measure. The latter action takes effect on January 1st, 2018.

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YouTube released a statement about its action, and made it clear that Amazon's lack of support for Nest, Chromecast and other Google related products and services was behind its decision to once again block YouTube from the Amazon Echo Show. In the statement, YouTube does say that it hopes "to resolve these issues soon."


source: TheVerge

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