> And that’s directly tied to Chromecast’s absence on Amazon.com. Since there’s no easy way of watching Prime Video, Amazon won’t sell it. But it’s Amazon’s own fault that Prime Video doesn’t work with Chromecast. Amazon has the power to make it happen. What’s Google supposed to do in this scenario?
> Amazon’s decision to remove popular, well-liked products from its store over this spat — or never sell them to begin with — is an ugly example of the company throwing its weight and power around. No one should be surprised that Google is crying foul. Is the company under any obligation to sell Google Home — the chief rival to its own Echo? Of course not. Them’s the breaks. But the Chromecast situation is troubling, and Amazon’s recent halting of sales for certain Nest hardware (with no real explanation) seems juvenile. Prime shipping is still a very powerful incentive, and Amazon is well aware of that.
https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/5/16738752/google-youtube-a...
Amazon is nowhere near innocent in their feud
Amazon built the Fire stick to be compatible with Chromecast. Google then changed the Chromecast protocols repeatedly to prevent this.
Only after that did Amazon ban the Chromecast devices from their store.
Tell the whole story, at least.
That player interface page was very device specific (e.g. the current youtube page doesn't even work on Gen1 chromecasts with 50-60Hz videos), so Amazon couldn't use those, and only supported the direct links.
Which is not that unusual — youtube could just serve a dash manifest link that directly concatenates ad and video, or build their player page better.
Google actually did it to lock people in to their Chromecast implementation (a lot of third party implementations showed up in the early days), especially for fear of DRM being broken.
We could have had an entire open ecosystem with a single standard replacing mpd, sonos etc working with everything, were it not for those actions Google took (so as a consumer and open source dev, I'm naturally pissed).
I don't believe this is true. Do you have a source?
Edit:
> A person familiar with Google's thinking on the matter told Engadget that a big point of contention had been the fact that Amazon implemented what was essentially a hacked version of YouTube on both the Echo Show and Fire TV. Rather than work with Google to build versions of its apps that work on Amazon's devices, Amazon has been trying to do it itself -- a move that cuts out features and also likely affects Google's ability to collect on some of the ad revenue that comes from its videos.
https://www.engadget.com/2017-12-05-google-blocking-youtube-...
Amazon has responded, and its response points to the unfair nature of Google effectively blocking access to the YouTube web site based on the type of device being used to access it. "Echo Show and Fire TV now display a standard web view of YouTube.com and point customers directly to YouTube's existing website," Amazon's statement reads. "Google is setting a disappointing precedent by selectively blocking customer access to an open website. We hope to resolve this with Google as soon as possible."
The only issue I have with Firefox + Youtube is that there's a memory leak somewhere in my addon setup that causes Firefox to bloat, but I haven't bothered to figure out which addon causes that because the impact has diminished greatly since I've installed another 16GB of RAM for other reasons.