Back in May, Amazon announced the Echo Show, a new version of the company’s virtual assistant speaker with a built-in screen. Since its release, when users asked to watch cooking and music videos, it pulled them from YouTube. All of that changed today as Google has now removed YouTube support from the Echo Show…
At this moment, according to statements given to The Verge, it appears that Amazon and Google are in the middle of a dispute as to how YouTube should work on the Echo show.
According to Amazon, Google unexpectedly pulled YouTube support for the Echo Show:
Google made a change today at around 3 pm. YouTube used to be available to our shared customers on Echo Show. As of this afternoon, Google has chosen to no longer make YouTube available on Echo Show, without explanation and without notification to customers. There is no technical reason for that decision, which is disappointing and hurts both of our customers.
According to Google, however, the two companies have been negotiating, but an agreement had not been met:
We’ve been in negotiations with Amazon for a long time, working towards an agreement that provides great experiences for customers on both platforms. Amazon’s implementation of YouTube on the 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.
For anyone who remembers from Windows Mobile’s “heyday,” Microsoft and Google were in a similar dispute over the YouTube application created for the operating system. Google ended up blocking the application and Microsoft had to default to the site’s mobile web view.
As per the reasoning why Google isn’t happy with how the Echo Show is displaying YouTube, it most likely has to do with the inability to use some of the platform’s main features like subscribing to channels, automatically playing of further videos, and more.
Since Amazon and Google have disputed over things before like the fact that Fire tablets use a forked version of Android without official support for Google Apps and Amazon pulling products like Chromecasts off of its shopping services, it isn’t likely that the Echo Show will regain YouTube support anytime soon.
More stories about Amazon:
- Amazon Prime Video is now available on Google Play for all, still no Chromecast support
- Amazon working on Alexa smart glasses, security camera w/ possible end-of-year launch
- You will soon be able to use Alexa within the Amazon app on Android
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