Earlier this year, Google and Amazon reached an agreement to bring their streaming video apps to each other’s platforms, following years of anti-competitive, anti-consumer behavior on both of their parts. Initially, the official YouTube app launched on Fire TV devices, while Prime Video launched on Chromecast and Android TV. Today, YouTube TV has also now become available on Fire TV devices, Amazon announced.
In a blog post, the company says the official YouTube TV app will launch on Fire TV Stick (2nd Generation), Fire TV Stick 4K, the all-new Fire TV Cube, plus Toshiba, Insignia, Element, and Westinghouse brand Fire TV Edition Smart TVs. It will also be supported on some previous generation Fire TV devices, including the Fire TV Cube (1st Gen), Fire TV (2nd Gen), Fire TV (3rd Gen — Pendant Design).
However, the app will not run on the 1st Gen Fire TV or Fire TV Stick.
YouTube TV is Google’s live TV streaming service, and a rival to Sling TV, Hulu with Live TV, PlayStation Vue, DirecTV Now (recently rebranded as AT&T TV NOW), and others. It offers over 70 channels from networks like Discovery, TNT, CNN, ESPN, FX and on-demand programming, as well as an unlimited cloud DVR. This year, it also had an exclusive range of MLB game broadcasts.
Amazon and Google had been at war for years, making things difficult for their end users. Amazon banned Google hardware from its shopping site on a number of occasions. They also feuded in 2017 over Amazon’s implementation of a YouTube player on its Echo Show, which Google said it did without consultation. YouTube pulled Amazon’s access, then Amazon worked around the problem by sending Echo users to the YouTube homepage instead.
While the companies battled, consumers lost out. And in the case of companies like Amazon and Google, those customer bases tend to overlap. A Chromecast user will want to watch Prime Video or buy Google products from Amazon. A FireTV user wants to watch YouTube. And so on.
As a result, the more neutral platform Roku became the most popular streaming platform in the U.S.
At the time of the original agreement, Amazon and Google said that other YouTube properties would come to Fire TV in the future, including YouTube Kids. That’s now the last remaining YouTube video app missing from Fire TV, and YouTube previously launched on Amazon hardware and YouTube TV begins rolling out today.
