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Comment by INTPenis | Hacker News Reader

Then how come they sell pixel phones?

Edit: I did some googling and it appears that amazon pulled both Apple TV and Chromecast because they didn't offer Amazon Prime. Which is clearly abuse of their position in the market to me but I'm just a layperson.

Then int 2017 they were slated to come back but now in 2018 I can't find chromecasts anymore. Only peripherals for it and clones.

Edit: Lol I just noticed they're selling the "fire tv stick" instead. What a stupid name.

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> it appears that amazon pulled both Apple TV and Chromecast because they didn't offer Amazon Prime.

Amazon pulled Prime Video off of Chromecast themselves to sell the Fire TV (stick). Google did not remove Amazon's apps.

Google did pull YouTube app from Amazon devices. https://www.engadget.com/2017/12/05/google-blocking-youtube-...

That was in retaliation to Amazon nonsense. Get your timelines straight.

Google first changed the Chromecast protocol a few times to prevent Amazon from using it.

There’s a lot of fuckery there, and those of us that tried to build open source chromecast clones got fucked by Google as well.

If you wish to argue against this, please offer me a way to implement the Chromecast protocol on a raspberry pi, reliably, without it constantly being broken by Google’s updates.

> Google first changed the Chromecast protocol a few times to prevent Amazon from using it.

How can they do that without also kicking out Netflix, Twitch, Hulu, etc.?

Simply by the fact that none of these attempted to build a chromecast receiver?

There were three groups working on such a receiver, Google with their Chromecast, Amazon wanted to support receiving chromecasts with the fire TV, and open source projects trying to receive chromecasts on the raspberry pi.

Google changed that protocol a few times, only Google's products can receive chromecast streams today.

Oh, on the receiver side. So Amazon pulled Chromecast support from their apps because they couldn't get reliable Cast protocol support on their FireTV. Thank you for clarifying.

Yes, that's basically it — they couldn't get reliable cast support to receive on the FireTV, and they couldn't reliably send from the Kindles due to Google's protocol changes.

And that was already after Google's anticompetitive actions against the Kindle Fire devices.

I'd be interested to see a citation for your claim that Google intentionally changed the Cast protocol to prevent Amazon from using it.

Your argument that Cast is hard on unsupported platforms is irrelevant. They are, by definition, unsupported, and Google is under no obligation to support them.

Google provides an SDK that people are free to use on the platforms Google chooses to support.

https://developers.google.com/cast/docs/developers

How do I receive a chromecast with that SDK, please?

The point is not about sending, but about receiving, as was possible with miracast, and which would have made the fire stick a killer product (by having immediate compatibility with all Google apps' casting feature)

Source? I couldn't find anything from a cursory search.

This is nonsense. You can cast with Plex from your home server of all things. I'm sure Amazon can figure out how to use an SDK.

Plex can receice chromecasts, as Amazon was planning to with the Fire Stick, and as open source projects did?

xoogler here, one of my teams implemented cast functionality in google photos. IIRC, this was definitely not the reason; the protocol was initially very limited and it was changed to make it more secure while also adding capabilities.

That's the sending protocol (and I've seen those changes, I reversed that, too), but I meant the changes to the receiving protocol.

There's a separate protocol app → Google and Google → Chromecast. Or at least, there was, after countless changes, I gave up attempting to build a raspberry pi with chromecast support.

And of course, Chromecast replaced the dlna protocols and Miracast support in Android. I lost the ability to stream the screen on my nexus devices to open source receivers back then, because Google had to go proprietary.

How is FireTV stupid, well more stupid than any product name? Amazon have a media receiver line called Fire, FireTV fits the brand and tells you what it does, same as Chromecast -- same format.

Fire TV is garbage. The only reason to buy one is to flash something else on to it. It doesn't support casting and good luck finding something good to watch.

Well I use it and have found we watch Netflix in preference to terrestrial UK TV to the point we watch so little BBC now we might go back to streaming only and forgo the license fee.

A chacun son gout.

I got a bad impression from the product on amazon. The shape was square compared to round, the name sounded too much like fire stick and wasn't easy on the tongue. I know now that it's based on Fire (and they have another product called Kindle) but when I just saw the product image say "fire tv stick" with a square USB device in the background I was not impressed.

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