Comment by HJain13 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by HJain13 | Hacker News Reader

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> Amazon isn’t without fault either. The company dragged its feet for years in releasing a proper Prime Video app for Android in the Google Play Store. Previously, you had to install Amazon’s own, separate app store and only then could you install Prime Video. It was a sad, convoluted attempt at luring users to the Amazon Appstore. Even now, Prime Video still doesn’t support Chromecast.

> 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 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.

But still according to your comment, amazon started the feud first by banning chromecast, and it just escalated from there?

Changing the chromecast — at the time advertised as an "open" streaming standard — to lock competitors out was the first shot. It definitely started with Google.

If I recall correctly, Google changed the Chromecast protocols repeatedly to disable the Fire stick's implementation because the Fire was wrapping direct video links (e.g. removing all the official YouTube UI/features) and stripping ad plays.

The protocol only transmits links to an html page that will be used as a player interface (and can load ads, etc) and a direct video link.

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).

"Amazon built the Fire stick to be compatible with Chromecast. Google then changed the Chromecast protocols repeatedly to prevent this."

I don't believe this is true. Do you have a source?

I use Chromecast with Prime. Mine's from 2016 so I don't know if they stopped supporting it on newer models. Everything else though, I agree with. Big tech, like any monopoly, does not play fair.

This is old. They work now.

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