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.
YouTube on the Amazon Echo Show before it was originally blocked by Google
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.
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."
"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."-YouTube
Alan, an ardent smartphone enthusiast and a veteran writer at PhoneArena since 2009, has witnessed and chronicled the transformative years of mobile technology. Owning iconic phones from the original iPhone to the iPhone 15 Pro Max, he has seen smartphones evolve into a global phenomenon. Beyond smartphones, Alan has covered the emergence of tablets, smartwatches, and smart speakers.
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