It looks like Amazon and Google are having a little dispute. According to statements given to The Verge, YouTube no longer works on the recently released Echo Show due to Amazon violating Google’s terms of service. However, Amazon doesn’t admit this in its statement and says how this change hurts both them and their customers.
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.
Meanwhile, Google says the way Amazon implemented YouTube on the Echo Show violates its terms of service. It seems hopeful, however, that the two companies can work something out to get the functionality back up and running.
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 the record, Amazon and Google have never really gotten along. If you recall, the former’s Fire tablets don’t ship with the latter’s Play Store, and that’s likely due to no agreement between the companies. Of course, Amazon has famously done their best to avoid using Google services on their products (no Google Play integration in Fire OS, Amazon Music uses Alexa instead of Google Assistant – shall I go on?), but something like YouTube should at least deserve a spot on the company’s smart home device with a screen on it. And it seems like Amazon agrees. It just looks like Google’s being the stickler here. I guess they have to make sure everything goes the Google way.
When/if the functionality goes live again, we’ll let you know.
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