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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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...
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...