In a move that sounds mind boggling in 2017, Google decided to pull its YouTube app from the Amazon Echo Show. Basically, the device’s access to the famous video service has been cut, which leaves many people fond of cooking without their favourite video recipes.
The message displayed on the machine says “Currently, Google is not supporting YouTube on Echo Show”. Amazon confirmed this problem, which has been happening since yesterday at 3 PM. The Jeff Bezos company highlighted that Google did that without notification to customers and without technical reasons. The Echo Show is part tablet, part virtual assistant speaker and the whole idea of having a big screen on it was to watch cooking lessons, music videos and more.
That happened on YouTube, when you were not in the mood for Amazon’s own video service. Google also made a statement, saying that they’ve been in negotiations with Amazon for a long time, trying to get an agreement going, in order to improve the experience for customers on both platforms. The Amazon implementation of YouTube on the Echo Show is supposed to have violated the terms of service and “broken user experience”.
Basically Google wants the full YouTube experience with its full functionality on the Show, but Amazon is cutting its wings, somehow. Google is rather typical of the way it wants YouTube shown on products from other companies and they have terms of service to go with that. Previous problems included the one with Microsoft over the YouTube app on Windows Phone, which was atrocious to be honest.
There’s nothing a solid round of negotiations won’t fix and I estimate that it will be back in a week tops.
