If Amazon’s Fire TV platform is your streaming medium of choice, you won’t have to use a web browser to watch YouTube videos for much longer. Amazon and Google have apparently decided to end a spat that kept YouTube off Amazon’s TV service for more than a year, with an announcement today that a YouTube app is coming back to Amazon Fire TV devices “in the coming months.” As part of this agreement, the Prime Video app will be able to stream to Chromecast and Chromecast built-in devices, with Prime Video becoming more widely available across Android TV device partners.
Additionally, the YouTube TV and YouTube Kids apps will also come to Fire TV later this year.
Neither company revealed much today beyond the normal platitude-filled press release quotes that mention how much they’re “excited” to be working with each other. An escalation of disagreements had soured both companies on each other to the point that things got this bad, with Google ticked off at one point about Amazon not offering some of its products for sale and Amazon blasting Google for pulling YouTube from Fire TV devices by arguing Google was “selectively blocking” access to an open website.
Now that both companies seem to have buried the hatchet, what today’s announcement means is that once the YouTube app returns to Fire TV, users will be able to sign in to their existing YouTube account, access their full library of content, and play videos in 4K HDR at 60 fps on supported devices.
Likeweise, Chromecast and Chromecast built-in users, along with Android TV users, will be able to access the full Prime Video catalog including the latest seasons of Amazon Originals like The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Hanna, Homecoming, Bosch, Catastrophe and The Grand Tour, along with Amazon Original movies like Donald Glover’s Guava Island, and Academy Award-nominated films like The Big Sick and Cold War.
Notably, Amazon has begun selling the Chromecast again, but it still doesn’t sell other Google products like the Google Home that competes with Amazon’s Echo devices or any Nest products.
