The two tech giants in a joint press release on Thursday announced that in the coming months, the official YouTube app will launch on Amazon Fire TV devices and Fire Edition smart TVs. What’s more, the Prime Video app is coming to Chromecast and devices with Chromecast built in. This is a feud that has kept a native YouTube app off of the Fire TV platform for well over a year. Customers were really the ones who were disadvantaged as soon as these two tech giants entered into this spat, so to see that it’s over is very good news.
Google will bring YouTube back to Amazon’s Fire TV devices “later this year.” The flagship YouTube app will come first sometime within the next few months — there’s no firm launch date as of yet — and it will be followed by YouTube TV, the company’s subscription TV service, and the child-oriented YouTube Kids before the end of 2019. Fire TV will become fully certified for YouTube, signaling that it offers first-rate video quality and minimal buffering. YouTube for Fire TV will also support Alexa voice commands for searching and playing content.
In exchange, Amazon will be adding Chromecast integration to its own Prime Video mobile app, allowing users to more easily view their movies and shows on a TV screen if they own one of Google’s affordable Chromecast streaming dongles. Prime Video will also become universally available on Android TV; until now, it’s been limited to select devices running that operating system.
Google and Amazon would not comment on the specifics of their new agreement, nor would they specify how often they’ve tried to resolve things over the course of this stubborn feud. When YouTube was initially pulled off of Fire TV, there was a ton of finger pointing between the two companies.
The new agreement is strictly about streaming and doesn’t include any retail component, so Amazon hasn’t caved when it comes to selling Google Home (a direct competitor to its Echo speakers) or Nest’s more recent devices.
