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The Amazon Echo Show is an Alexa-powered voice assistant product that includes a touchscreen and a camera. Google has pulled support for YouTube on the device:
Google's popular video-sharing site appears to have disappeared from Amazon's device due to a dispute over how YouTube should work on the Echo Show. According to Amazon, Google pulled support for YouTube on the Echo Show on Tuesday afternoon:
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.
But Google accused Amazon of breaking its rules on the way YouTube is presented, adding that talks between the two companies haven't yielded a solution.
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.
The move is likely related to YouTube functionality desktop users are used [to] that is lacking from the Echo Show, including being able to share, recommend and comment on videos.
Also at The Verge.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Kawumpa on Wednesday September 27 2017, @10:49PM (3 children)
...is that people still buy this shit. All of these companies are working really hard at reducing the internet to a transport layer for their incredibly limited appliances. Think about it, everybody used to have a computer that could be used to work, play games, listen to music, watch movies, communicate with friends, surf the web and access content from everyone anywhere. These days, you need apps, not necessarily available for your device, to access content, not necessarily available in your location. And unless you are quite tech savvy you will be bombarded with the stupidest and most annoying advertising conceivable. Best of all, you pay for it.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Wednesday September 27 2017, @11:48PM (1 child)
Even if you have a desktop or laptop computer, an app might not be available for your computer. For example, a Mac-only app won't be (legally) running on a Dell, HP, or home-built computer.
Even in the DVD era, when owning a desktop or laptop computer with an optical drive was expected, DVD players and DVD-ROM drives still enforced DVD region coding.
(Score: 3, Informative) by LoRdTAW on Thursday September 28 2017, @07:04PM
Ah! But that's the beauty of the PC platform: You can run whatever you want. Legal or not. There are no rules about side loading, app stores, and allowed channels. You download and install anything you want from the benign to outright malicious. Virtual machines, emulators, compatibility layers. Try that on your mobile iDevice. Even MacOS and Windows are looking to move to app stores and locking down the PC.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 30 2017, @03:54PM
So, it might be worth remembering that people can own more than one device. I've got a general purpose desktop in the living room (the TV is one of the monitors), and a laptop in the bedroom, and they do anything and everything I feel like making them do, including host my own media for streaming to my phone or wherever else so as to avoid the likes of Spotify, youtube, etc. That all said, I've also got an Echo Dot, which is a lot easier and faster to interface with while I'm throwing on shoes running out the door in the morning to check the weather or the day's news than the general purpose computer would be.
These absolutely ARE appliances, and frankly, they're better than the appliances that do similar jobs without the Internet functionality (home weather stations come to mind). It's not a matter of reducing the Internet to this task, but using it for this task...along with the rest.
As for the people who ARE getting these instead of a computer, well, fine, I'd say that sounds silly to me. That said, they sound like people who probably spent more time fighting with their computer and nagging their nerd friends to fix it for them than they ever did using it in the first place.