Arguably Google went too far by blanket blocking based on device, but it might have been the only viable option available to them. Now that Amazon has folded and made the app a wrapper to the YouTube web page rather than accessing the videos directly, I expect Google will enable access again.

https://www.theverge.com/2013/8/15/4624706/google-blocks-win...

What was Amazon thinking?

Google has a point about Amazon not carrying their devices, but I'd take a different approach - I'd lead every YouTube video played through a Fire device with an ad for Google's devices.

Amazon punishes Google directly as a company: users wanting Google product only have to change the URL in their browser.

Google in return punishes customer having already bought their Amazon device. If the customer uses a Fire stick for intance, the only alternative to have youtube on the tv is to buy another dongle.

The level of fucking with the end customer is disproportionate.

For most customers, that's about as "doesn't work" as it gets.

I disagree. On the "open web", users must have the right to consume the content the way they want to. Or do you also think that adblockers, user styles, and the like are "clearly a foul"?

The fight is understandable, but that's why I'll always choose to consume content using a general-purpose computer instead of these restrictive appliances.

I'm very open web in concept, but just because I want the web to be open doesn't mean I'm entitled to everyones content for free with no restrictions.

As a content provider, you should be allowed to put whatever restrictions on it that you want - just like the real world. Just keep your restrictions off of my computer. Eg, I DO NOT want to see DRM chips on my PC to protect companies. I am certainly fine with them requiring a DRM specific browser though, I can choose not to go to their site and not to use their browser.

In the real world, I can sell you a paper magazine or give it to you for free. I cannot prevent you from ignoring the ads or hiring someone to cut them out with scissors.

If a site wants to require me to pay in order to access it, that's valid. But if they want to say "you must instruct your computer to download and display our ads", that's not valid, IMO.

My browser is an agent that works for me. The server is an agent that works for the site. We should each be free to instruct them as we wish.

// We should each be free to instruct them as we wish.

That's not what you are claiming at all. If the company's server determines you are preventing ads then it is within the company's rights to instruct the server to stop serving your browser content.

Why not? I can sell you a video stream without ads for $1. Or I can let you watch it for free with the implicit agreement that you'll watch ads (which will cover the costs of the bandwidth you are using). You want the best of both worlds - you want to watch it for free and not watch any ads. How is that not stealing my bandwidth? If you are going to block the ads, that's fine, but it's your moral obligation to back out of my site and not to consume my bandwidth.

I understand what you're saying about the producer's dependence on ad revenue. But never before has a media existed where someone could force you to consume advertising against your will.

If you provide content with ads and people decline to look at your ads, you've got a problem with your business model.

And by the way, I don't block ads on, eg, StackOverflow, because the ads are tasteful and useful. But if a site with news articles wants to show me animated, sexually suggestive ads for cheap pharmaceuticals, yes, I'm going to block that. I'm not going to let them steal my bandwidth and my mental calm for that.

> If you block ads on my website and I detect it, It's fully within my rights to blacklist you for stealing.

Other than the word "stealing", I agree. It's fully within your rights to block or allow access however you want. And it's fully within my rights to decide whether to look at your ads.

You control your server. I control my browser. This is good.

It's a terrible analogy that people should stop using in this debate. You can debate about whether it's good business on their part. You can debate about whether they should force drm onto your computer. But you can't reasonably debate that just because it's on the web they shouldn't be allowed enter into a financial exchange with consumers and that they shouldn't be able to refuse to do business with people who do not wish to enter into that exchange with them.

...until they find a way to detect whether you actually viewed the ads, or maybe even retained any of the content from them.

But you can't reasonably debate that just because it's on the web they shouldn't be allowed enter into a financial exchange with consumers and that they shouldn't be able to refuse to do business with people who do not wish to enter into that exchange with them.

You're implying that it's OK for consumers to essentially be force-fed ads, if these companies eventually develop such technology that lets them do so. Do you really want to live in such a society?

    You're implying that it's OK for consumers to essentially be force-fed ads

And yes I am fine living is such a society. I can always choose not to enter into the transaction. No one is forcing me to watch Youtube, Or read a blog, Or listen to a podcast.

I think everyone can agree that adblockers go far beyond these examples you listed. Adblockers are an automated, shareable process.

> But never before has a media existed where someone could force you to look at advertising against your will.

Last time I checked nothing is stopping you from muting your computer and going to the bathroom during ads. Like I said, you just want your cake and eat it too. If you block ads on my website and I detect it, It's fully within my rights to blacklist you for stealing.

If Walmart only let you "buy" DVDs at the checkout by watching ads that the cashier shows you, how is it okay to just steal the DVDs because you don't want to watch the ads?

I can buy DVDs somewhere else, while most Internet videos are only on YouTube nowadays.

Probably they won't. WebViews don't return device ids amd don't let you set persistent cookies which are basically what's needed to get ad targeting correct on mobile.

If I owned the Youtube, I'll block Amazon too. They're practically taking advantage and not want to give anything back. Don't want to sell google appliances, don't want to participate in youtube ad program. Only word that came to mind is to describe such a attitude is leech.

This is false, the app on the fire tv is simply a webview of https://www.youtube.com/tv that is publicly accessible

They are not doing any, no my knowledge, more than wrapping that page up in a webview

Correct?

I do not know what will happen on 1/1/2018. Redirecting to YouTube main page is likely not a very good option because the UI would be almost unusable on TV. I have seen some people suggesting the Silk Browser as a work around, I have tried it is it not very user friendly and does not work at all with the youtube/tv interface.

I am likely ordering a Roku Today to see if I like them, Amazon is risking alot here, this YouTube situation may be the final straw for me (and many others I suspect). They started putting ads on the FireTV Device, they are spending a crap ton of money to get Sports I have no interest in, now YouTube is pulling out. It seems every day the FireTV ecosystem get worse and worse, time to move on i think

In short Roku and nowtv is dead to me.

Google making FireTV worse means I'm not going to buy Google - I can't endorse that behaviour - so what else is there? Just no-name android devices??

Probably I'll use a hack; presumably using a proxy to mask FireTV, or stripping UA info is going to work.

From the article:

> 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."

1. Google effectively blocking access to the YouTube web site based on the type of device being used to access it.

2. Show and Fire TV now display a standard web view of YouTube.com and point customers directly to YouTube's existing website

I understood it, that Google blocked Amazon to access youtube via native app. And Amazon reaction was to switch their youtube app to webview, which basically renders web version of youtube.

I feel like the web as we know it should be abandoned to coorporations and people that want an open platform for knowledge sharing should start something new that has to stay open.

"corporate interests" haven't trapped the web.

People are choosing to pretend that the web has somehow ceased to exist outside of a few silos, or that javascript has no purpose other than to further corporate or media interests, or that Facebook owns HTML now, but none of that is true. The web is just as open as it's ever been.

Just because mainstream viewing habits tend to converge towards a few corporate owned social media sites does not mean the web has become owned by corporations, it just means people have gotten lazy and don't want to work to discover new content.

We are building drm into the browsers themselves now. We are letting companies tell people that "there is no way to access media, unless you go through our walled garden" and defending the company! The open web is farther gone than it's ever been.

No one is putting a gun to anyone's head and forcing them to use EME when they distribute media, and it certainly will no more be the case that all media will be forced through DRM and a walled garden than it ever was. The companies that will use this are the companies that would have used DRM anyway, just in another form. The web, as a whole, is unaffected.

We don't need to "start something different" we just need to ensure that what's there can still be used for both corporations, and the public at large.

Of all these alternatives, I think bitchute.com is really innovative in that it has a Bittorrent video viewer that solves the bandwidth usage problem by going p2p. Not a lot of stuff on there yet. For now, that site is mostly full of political content that would get banned, or at least demonitized, on YouTube.

I have a hard time getting over the irony that the alt-right are going to be the ones to save the open Internet while the rest of Silicon Valley sits around and does nothing because they need to be protected by the machines of loving grace [1] that are the vast content moderation and filtering apparatus of the major social networks.

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Watched_Over_by_Machines...

Of course it will be a bit slower at startup times, but it's still faster than a video that has been removed in your country or removed due other arbitrary reasons.

How moving to a new, less popular distribution mechanism would make that any better is not clear to me.

I don't think that's a particularly bad thing.

JavaScript makes the web powerful so more content can be distributed via the Web. Without JavaScript we'd be having much more native apps, not less.

The web runs on any platform with a web browser (for the most part), native apps only run from one platform. Crippling the Web leads to more silos.

No javascript = 100% code runs on the server.

We really need to start seeing the internet as a dark and scary place again. There's too much blind trust nowadays.

And unlike everything else running on your machine, Javascript is sandboxed and limited in its capabilities, and you can turn it off if you want to. Try pre-emptively turning off your C++ runtime before booting up. Hell, for that matter, try rewriting your binaries on the fly the way you can override and rewrite javascript in the browser.

Yes, there are potential threats from running javascript, but javascript still relatively less threatening than everything else, including every other kind of executable code that can run from the web, such as java applets, flash and silverlight. I understand you don't like javascript, but you're overstating the malice of forethought behind its application in all but the edge cases.

> Yes, there are potential threats from running javascript, but javascript still relatively less threatening than everything else...

yeah, all of those plain html attacks have been pretty damaging.... oh, wait, there are hardly any, because html makes sense, and is designed with the user in mind. JS is the opposite.

> including every other kind of executable code that can run from the web, such as java applets, flash and silverlight.

Those are shitty too. But just because they are worse, doesn't make JS acceptable.

> I understand you don't like javascript, but you're overstating the malice of forethought behind its application in all but the edge cases.

I'm not overstating the malice of forethought. I get that 99% of JS is by people who want their site to work well, and use it with good intentions. But even good intentions, done wrong, lead to bad results.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/07/amid-unprecedented-con...

Also you have to use a native app for Netflix and if they wanted to, they could also stop supporting Amazon devices at any time. There wouldn't even be a work-around thanks to EME.

The YouTube TV service doesn't use EME, no. And isn't terribly relevant to this thread either.

2. I firmly believe now that EME is standard YouTube will start using it, especially as they start rejecting independent creators in favor of more High Budget Commerical Creators and Tradional media whom they already show a preference for. These Companies will demand it just like the big Movie Studios

3. I am not subscribed to YouTube TV service so I can not confirm but do you have a source or technical document showing they do not. I would be shocked if they were allowed to get Commercial deals to carry main stream cable channels and stream then in the clear with no copy protection.

A company can introduce additional constraints on top to limit access. However this should still be done based on standards. Using a variety of derived properties to block specific device type is evil in my book. My 2c.

Of course, "all" does not include 1080p playback on Netflix unless you use Edge or Safari

(Almost everything these days is a general purpose computing device, even our "specialized" hardware is general purpose.)

Has a GPU to run games/movies? Fine.

Has an "Amazon" logo so it won't load any Amazon competitor's websites? Bull. Hocky.

This is so weird and dumb it's unbelievable. There is an Amazon Video app for iPhone and iPad why are they not supporting Android?

There is one for Roku but they have been dragging their feet with supporting the AppleTV even though they promised one "by the end of the year".

They support AirPlay to AppleTV but not ChromeCast.

https://www.amazon.com/Amazon-com-Amazon-Prime-Video/dp/B00N...

Edit: it is on Play Store apparently. Might changed recently

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.amazon.avo...

the "standard" one just ships to certain countries, the "basic" one only ships from certain places to certain other places

I installed it from there on my devices when Prime Video launched worldwide in Dec 2016.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2014/09/09/amazon-brings-prime-instan...

https://sixcolors.com/post/2017/12/amazon-prime-video-now-av...

So there is at least an amazon video app on android in general, if it can't be on the google store I don't know.

Maybe they've got a deal with Amazon to pre-load the app? I did sideload the Amazon app store.

The iOS app works, but you can't purchase from it (I speculate because Apple would get a cut). Same goes for the Kindle app.

What are you talking about? Either in a browser or via https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.amazon.avo... - both are working fine, even on systemless rooted android.

You can't call something open source and get all the benefits of that, while also allowing statements like this. Forking is fair play in open source, and if you don't like it, don't make your thing open source.

Or you use the GPL license instead of Apache.

FYI, Amazon finally released their app on the US Play Store a couple of months ago. Not that this excuses all their other crappy behavior, and the years it took for them to finally do the right thing.

That being said, Amazon (I believe) started this duel with stopping sales of various Google devices on their website.

This spat is dumb.

You've been able to do this for at least 3 years. Not one-step-you're-done-easy, but officially supported with no magic incantations required: https://www.theverge.com/2014/9/9/6126165/amazon-prime-insta...

200,000 reviews over that time is a lot.

http://www.cordcuttersnews.com/amazon-pulls-twitch-channel-r...

Why not? I regularly watch Prime Video on Android.