Earlier in 2019, tech giants Amazon and Google had agreed to bring their streaming video apps to each other’s platform after year’s anti-competitive, anti-consumer behavior on both parts. Earlier the official YouTube app was launched on the FireTV devices, while the Prime Video was launched on Chromecast and Android TV. Now the YouTube TV has also become available on Fire TV devices including Fire TV-powered televisions.
The company in a blog post said that the official YouTube TV app will launch on Fire TV Stick (2nd Generation), all-new Fire TV Cube, Fire TV Stick 4K, Plus Toshiba, Insignia, Element and Westinghouse brand Fire TV Edition Smart TVs. It will also be supported on some of the earlier generation Fire TV devices including the Fire TV Cube (1st Gen), Fire TV (2nd Gen), Fire TV (3rd Gen – Pendant design)
But the app will not run on the 1st Gen Fire TV or Fire TV Stick. Google’s YouTube TV is a live streaming service and is a rival to Sling TV, Hulu with Live TV, Playstation Vue , Direct TV Now (recently branded as AT&T TV Now), and others. This offers more than 70 channels from networks like Discovery, TNT, ESPN, CNN, FX and on-Demand programming, along with unlimited Cloud DVR. Amazon and Google have been at logger heads since many years, while making things tough for their end users. The e-commerce giant banned Google hardware from its shopping site on a number of occasions.
They also locked horns in 2017 over Amazon’s implementation of a YouTube player on its Echo Show that Google said it did without consultation. YouTube then pulled Amazon’s access and Amazon Worked around the problem by sending Echo users to the YouTube homepage instead. While the companies fought, the consumers lost out. In case of companies like Amazon and Google, the customer bases tend to overlap. For instance a Chromecast user will want to watch Prime Video or buy Google products from Amazon.
Photo Credits: Chrome unboxed
