Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday September 27 2017, @09:09PM   Printer-friendly
from the no-youtube-for-you dept.

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.


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
(1)
  • (Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 27 2017, @09:09PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 27 2017, @09:09PM (#574041)

    Back and Black. 🅳🅸🅲🅺 🅽🅸🅶🅶🅴🆁🆂.

    You know so we never fuck no old pussy.

    We fuck a hole lotta young pussy tho.

    🅳🅸🅲🅺 🅽🅸🅶🅶🅴🆁🆂 ain't gonna pull out til yo snatch be overflowin wit black hot nigger cum.

  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Wednesday September 27 2017, @09:28PM (3 children)

    by Rosco P. Coltrane (4757) on Wednesday September 27 2017, @09:28PM (#574049)

    Welcome to the world of cloud computing, where content is held hostage by a few greedy companies and customers are at their total mercy for access.

    Me, my movies, music, books and shit are downloaded once and hosted on my NAS. When Google has a fit of greediness, I still can access my content. Amazing concept eh?

    • (Score: 2) by ArhcAngel on Wednesday September 27 2017, @09:52PM

      by ArhcAngel (654) on Wednesday September 27 2017, @09:52PM (#574056)

      Same goes for Bezos and Amazon. I can happily stream Prime to my phone but the app "mysteriously" crashes when I try to run it on my Google TV device.

    • (Score: 2) by Pino P on Wednesday September 27 2017, @11:45PM (1 child)

      by Pino P (4721) on Wednesday September 27 2017, @11:45PM (#574101) Journal

      Me, my movies, music, books and shit are downloaded once and hosted on my NAS.

      But what protocol do your playback devices use to access your NAS? Because if your NAS makes features available through a built-in webserver, browsers won't let client-side scripts on cleartext HTTP pages use several features. Login pages over cleartext HTTP have a warning, Service Workers and Presentation API are already HTTPS-only, and there is persistent effort to make Fullscreen API HTTPS-only as well.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 30 2017, @03:45PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 30 2017, @03:45PM (#575300)

        This is what I ran into trying to write a skill for Alexa to stream the output from my MPD server over my Echo Dot. Basically, the only way around it would have been to pipe the output of MPD into an Icecast server set up with https, which is pretty terribly documented, because who bothers to encrypt an Icecast stream?

        I decided it wasn't worth the time and aggravation it was going to take and gave up...after all, it's not that hard to just tap a shortcut on my phone to get it all streaming right out of the same speakers. It does sort of beg the question of whether or not insisting on https ABSOLUTELY EVERYWHERE is really the best solution, however.

  • (Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Wednesday September 27 2017, @09:41PM

    by fyngyrz (6567) on Wednesday September 27 2017, @09:41PM (#574053) Journal

    Pretty sure the phrases "youtube customers" and "great experience" don't belong anywhere near each other without an intervening disclaimer carrying the approximate rhetorical force of a MOAB.

    How many advertisements do you want to click out of the way of the content today? How many web pages with completely unwanted and unwarranted auto-play? How many absolutely worthless comments?

    You want a great viewing experience?

    Go find a DVD or Bluray with the ability skip previews. If it doesn't offer that, try to return it with the complaint that it is inherently defective.

    That has at least some chance of providing a decent viewing experience. Sometimes. Otherwise... nope.

  • (Score: 2) by ArhcAngel on Wednesday September 27 2017, @10:00PM (1 child)

    by ArhcAngel (654) on Wednesday September 27 2017, @10:00PM (#574058)

    I just went to Amazon and they rolled out the fall https://www.amazon.com/b/?ie=UTF8&node=9818047011&ref_=fs_ods_fs_aucc_cp [amazon.com]Echo lineup and it looks like an all out assault on their partners. The new Echo Plus adds a smart hub eliminating the need for an external hub. And the Echo Spot looks like a round version of the Echo Show.

  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Kawumpa on Wednesday September 27 2017, @10:49PM (3 children)

    by Kawumpa (1187) on Wednesday September 27 2017, @10:49PM (#574079)

    ...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)

      by Pino P (4721) on Wednesday September 27 2017, @11:48PM (#574103) Journal

      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

      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.

      to access content, not necessarily available in your location

      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

        by LoRdTAW (3755) on Thursday September 28 2017, @07:04PM (#574490) Journal

        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.

        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

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 30 2017, @03:54PM (#575308)

      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.

  • (Score: 1) by spaceman375 on Wednesday September 27 2017, @11:26PM

    by spaceman375 (6166) on Wednesday September 27 2017, @11:26PM (#574091)

    "...share, recommend and comment on videos." Not even slightly. It's all about the Echo Show not showing ads.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 28 2017, @04:33AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 28 2017, @04:33AM (#574213)

    As a paying customer of both companies and also a human being, I have to say that Google is much more annoying. The hypocrisy of their "don't be evil" motto becomes more obvious every day. Meanwhile, Amazon has always been a regular money-making business without moral pretensions.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 28 2017, @02:43PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 28 2017, @02:43PM (#574359)

      They haven't had "don't be evil" as their unofficial motto for quite a few years now.

(1)