Amazon and Google have announced that an official YouTube app is finally returning to the Fire TV platform. And for the first time, Amazon Video will officially support Chromecast devices.
The updates should roll out “in the coming months,” and Amazon says other apps including YouTube TV and YouTube Kids will be coming to Fire TV later this year.
In other words, we may be inching toward a world where you need to pay dozens of subscription fees to access all the streaming video content you want… but at least it won’t matter much what media streamer you use to watch it.
YouTube and Prime Video both already support Roku, Samsung’s Smart TV platform, and LG’s weBOS smart TVs. But Google and Amazon have been duking it out for a while, leading to a set of workarounds — when Amazon launched web browser support for Fire TV devices, one of the key selling points was the ability to stream YouTube through a browser, even though there was no official YouTube app for the platform.
The announcement of a truce has been a long time coming. It’s been five months since Amazon started selling Chromecast devices to consumers again, after a three year hiatus.
But it’s unclear how far the agreement between the two companies go. The press release doesn’t mention whether YouTube is coming back to the Amazon Echo Show — Google pulled support for Amazon’s smart displays in late 2017.
I’m really glad. I only bought the Fire TV stick, because Amazon Video did not support Chromecast. Now I’ll be able to sell it.
Made this point to a friend a little bit ago.
As long as these 2 have been spatting, I would have preferred that they complete the integration and then made the announcement. Nothing like saying, “we’re going to support each other….in a few months.”
They probably realized that Roku was gaining serious ground while they were playing an absurd game of chicken with one another. Personally, I haven’t looked back after switching to Roku.
APPLE and Google?
What about them? They are not actually fighting like Amazon and Google were fighting. All Google apps are on Apple iOS, some Google apps even come early on iOS than Android.
Apple Music is on Android. Apple new streaming app will also come to Android TV (at least on Sony sets). Only thing really missing is iMessage and I don’t think it will come to Android anytime soon.
The comment was calling out an earlier typo in the headline for this article.