Frankly, how did Google end up with a good TV service? I'd rather not be relying on Google for TV streaming.
The whole spat started because Amazon removed Chromecast devices from their retail platform.
What's the point of singling them out?
- Google, who doesn't have to pay royalties
- Google and consumers, who can enjoy better compression and lower bandwidth
- Consumers, who can enjoy a much more mainstream video encoding format in not just YT but pretty much every app.
Google doesn't want to write off 45% of the set-top market right away, but at the same time it's 100% in the right to demand Roku support modern royalty-free codecs going forward.
Roku fights pretty much everybody nowadays and as someone who's been dealing with full-screen ads and missing apps on my $1000 TV, I have no sympathy for Roku whining about needing to support a modern codec.
There is a balance between keeping the burden of backwards compatibility forever and making efforts to keep things accessible to those without new hardware.
Google has invested a decent amount of money in developing its Roku app. Roku is now trying to hold users hostage so that Google continues to pour resources into supporting inferior technologies.
We will see how this ends - I think if Google blocked YT/YT TV on Roku, it would annihilate Roku and barely scratch Google.
Just peeling off this part of your comment. It seems like it would have been the natural course of events after they had to develop IPTV services for Google Fiber customers.