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Back in September, Amazon Echo Show owners began reporting that they couldn’t access YouTube content on their device. The message that popped up said, “Currently, Google is not supporting YouTube on Echo Show.” Google confirmed the block by stating they believed the presentation of YouTube on the Echo Show was in violation of their terms of service, “creating a broken user experience.”
Amazon Echo Show owners mirrored Google’s own opinion, with many lamenting that searching for content on the YouTube app felt broken and there wasn’t even a reliable way to look at your channel subscriptions. The layout was custom designed for the Amazon Echo show, but it left a lot to be desired. Now, Amazon has confirmed that YouTube is back and it seems all they did was update the app to showcase the web version of YouTube.
Check out this comparison of the two side-by-side that was taken by VoiceBot.
The shot on the left shows what the Amazon Echo Show YouTube interface looked like before this change, while the shot on the right shows the Echo Show YouTube interface from this month. It’s clear Amazon just shows the YouTube webpage to get around Google’s terms of service for the way YouTube is shown, but it doesn’t make for a pretty presentation on the Echo Show.
An Amazon representative also confirmed that the company is looking into providing more video sources for content, including those from Vimeo, Dailymotion and more. While it’s nice to see YouTube is once again accessible on the Amazon Echo Show, it’s hard to ignore that this seems to be a workaround to keep users happy while Amazon works on building a more fluid YouTube experience for the device.
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