by Jason Snell
Google and Amazon bury the hatchet
The Verge’s Chris Welch reported on Thursday about Amazon and Google making up when it comes to connecting video services and hardware platforms:
YouTube is returning to Amazon’s lineup of Fire TV products, and the Amazon Prime Video app will be adding Chromecast support and become more widely available on Android TV. Those two developments, jointly announced by both companies this morning, mark the end of a long-running standoff between Google and Amazon, a feud that has kept a native YouTube app off of the Fire TV platform for well over a year. Customers were really the ones who were disadvantaged as soon as these two tech giants entered into this spat, so to see that it’s over is very good news.
Google will bring YouTube back to Amazon’s Fire TV devices “later this year.” The flagship YouTube app will come first sometime within the next few months — there’s no firm launch date as of yet — and it will be followed by YouTube TV, the company’s subscription TV service, and the child-oriented YouTube Kids before the end of 2019. Fire TV will become fully certified for YouTube, signaling that it offers first-rate video quality and minimal buffering. YouTube for Fire TV will also support Alexa voice commands for searching and playing content.
It’s funny—I was bitten by the old state of affairs earlier today. I’m staying in a hotel room with two large flat-screen TVs equipped with Chromecasts. (Cool!) I wanted to watch the “Star Trek: Discovery” season finale, but I get CBS All Access through Amazon Prime Channels, and the Prime Video app doesn’t support Chromecast (yet). To solve the problem I had to sign up for a seven-day trial to CBS All Access within the CBS app, which does support Chromecast.
This is silly. I am glad to see these barriers coming down, bit by bit.