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Amazon and Google have ended a long-standing feud today with the announcement that their services will soon be made available on each other’s platforms.
Over the next few months, Amazon’s range of Fire TV devices — including set-top boxes, sticks, and smart TVs — will get their very own official YouTube app. Later in the year, the separate YouTube TV and YouTube Kids apps will also be made available on these devices. It’s worth noting here that no mention is made of support for Amazon’s Echo Show, which Google started blocking YouTube access on, alongside Fire TV, back in 2017 — though Amazon eventually found a workaround of sorts.
Convergence
While Amazon and Google began life as completely different propositions — one an online bookstore, the other a search engine — their paths have converged, with the two expanding into all manner of services, including cloud computing, voice-activated digital assistants, phones and tablets, video-streaming services, and more. This is at the root of recent disputes that saw Amazon kick Google’s media-streaming hardware Chromecast off its retail website in 2015, alongside Apple TV. Both of these devices compete with Amazon’s Fire TV, while neither featured Amazon’s Prime TV streaming service, although Amazon and Apple did manage to kiss and make up back in 2017.
A few months ago, Amazon started selling Chromecast again, which laid the foundation for today’s announcement.
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Indeed, the Prime Video app will soon be compatible with all Chromecast-enabled devices, meaning Prime Video users won’t have to buy a dedicated Fire TV stick or hope that their smart TV has a built-in Prime Video app — they will be able to beam their videos directly to the big screen through Chromecast.
Additionally, Prime Video will be made available on Android TV devices, bringing Google’s TV platform in line with other TV operating systems, such as Samsung, which already offers the Prime Video app.
“We are excited to work with Amazon to launch the official YouTube apps on Fire TV devices worldwide,” said YouTube’s head of product partnerships, Heather Rivera, in a press release. “Bringing our flagship YouTube experience to Amazon Fire TV gives our users even more ways to watch the videos and creators they love.”
This partnership has been a long time coming, and it should help remove customers from the crossfire between two of the world’s biggest technology competitors.
