It appears that Google and Amazon are having some problems. The former has decided to cut the Amazon Echo Show’s access to YouTube out of the blue. The Echo Show is a new Alexa-powered smart device that Amazon launched recently. It’s the first device of its kind from Amazon to feature a display, which means that it can do more than what you’d expect from a normal Echo device. It can’t let you watch YouTube now, though.
Amazon Echo Show could previously pull up videos from YouTube on demand. However, if you ask it to do that now, the device will just respond thusly: “Currently, Google is not supporting YouTube 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,” a spokesperson for Amazon confirmed, adding that there’s no technical reason for the decision “which is disappointing and hurts both of our customers.”
Amazon’s statement makes it seem that Google made a conscious choice to block YouTube on the Echo Show. However, Google has a different explanation. The company says that it has been in negotiations with Amazon for a long time in order to come to 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,” Google says.
As for when this tussle will be resolved, well we can just keep our fingers crossed.
Filed in . Read more about Amazon Echo Show, Google and YouTube.