Google Just Broke Amazon’s Workaround for YouTube on Fire TV | Hacker News Reader

Google Just Broke Amazon’s Workaround for YouTube on Fire TV

theverge.com

47 pointsIBM15 comments

This shit just erodes my trust in ALL the streaming services, devices, and companies. I cannot believe regulators aren’t going to use these shenanigans as evidence for some future action.

Really, the fact that each company abuses leverage in one realm (retail market position, device, services) to gain advantage in another is getting old.

Why do I own two copies of The Big Lebowski on iTunes and Amazon? Because of this stuff. Once or twice, and I'll grumble. If I find myself needing to move between incompatible ecosystems regularly, I suspect I’ll just ditch digital streaming.

I gave up when Disney wanted me to sign up for yet another service and link my old account to the new one so they could transfer movies before they shut down the old one. That would make 3 accounts, old, new and whatever the one is that lets me watch on Roku (4 if you count the Roku account), for access to a single movie.

And that is why, after trying Netflix and Amazon Prime for few months, I renewed my seed-box VPS for another three years. Yes, I didn't want to do it but the alternative just reeks of 'same old, same old' and I am not willing to subscribe to 5 streaming services (or maybe more).

Music streaming services aren't this bad but even those are not an option for me. One service has all the new Western/English songs, another has all the new local songs, and yet another has all the old songs (but not local old songs).. this goes on. No, I am not subscribing to more than 1, thank you very much. Luckily, in my country one song usually costs $0.06 to $0.24 depending upon whether it's an old (local) song or a new song (or a western/English song) and I usually just buy the individual ones and keep it on my phone and laptop (synced by iTunes).

This! I always get frustrated that you have to buy into an ecosystem to have cohesiveness. It's so stupid.

More consumers are actually affected by this than have been affected by the repeal of Net Neutrality. Maybe it is time to have streaming neutrality rules?

I assume this was a code or configuration change, which had an unexpected/unintended effect, and then got rolled back.

Yep, pushed to prod and broke it. I think as time goes on and we have more ubiquitous internet connected devices around us, we'll notice periods of temporary downtime far more often.

The “Everything But Google Store”.... How is that not antitrust?

Buy a locked down vendor controlled device and what do you expect? Why anyone wants any of Amazon's spyware in their home is beyond me anyway.

I whole heartily agree. It's insane the amount of privacy people will give up for a little bit of convenience...

Is having the device (Fire TV) on my network considered a security concern?

It's one of the cheapest/best options for 4k YouTube and Plex via Kodi/NewPipe/Kore on FDroid (essentially home made Chromecast).

> Buy a locked down vendor controlled device and what do you expect? Why anyone wants any of ["Amazon's"|"Google's"|"Apple's"] spyware in their home is beyond me anyway.

Adding "Microsoft"|"Samsung"|"LG"|"Vizio"

what information can the get from a home speaker that they can't already get from your phone if they wanted? do you not have a phone?

This is an awful strawman argument.

The excuse for invasive tech is in no way pointing to similar invasive tech.

The answer is to make both less invasive. The whataboutism is less than productive.

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