It is so dumb and twisted that there even needs to be a deal. Any web browser can hit youtube, you can probably get to youtube via a web browser anyway on a roku, if not they could in principle do that.
Also dumb and twisted that as a paying youtube subscriber, I could buy a computer (a roku) and not be allowed to access youtube on it.
I feel like this comes down to the same issue that every platform gets into with IAP. They want a cut because running a platform is expensive, but the apps on the platform don't want to pay for it, and talks break down.
Roku, like Apple, like Google, like Salesforce, like Patreon, like all platforms with payments, rely on their cut of the IAP to make money.
Roku, like Google, like Patreon, like all other platforms that are also on platforms, dont want to pay X% to the platform, they want a special rate.
The actual problem is that running a platform isn't that expensive -- there are a hundred tiny Linux distributions that do it on essentially volunteer work -- but once you control a platform with a large number of users you can use it to shake down anyone who wants to reach them. And then people object to the shakedown and do whatever they can to try and stop it.
But that is different. You cannot compare free and voluntary with commercial services. If you had to pay for those volunteers to maintain at a market rate, all that free stuff would be prohibitively expensive on a per user basis.
I agree that Roku, time and time again, has been too aggressive in their tactics to extract maximum profit from their users via the apps they consume (HBO disappeared for a while last year, and I think Showtime did as well), but they do have COSTS they have to cover, and profits they have to make to maximize value to shareholders.
Is this a perfect system, no, but it is the system that exists currently.
> If you had to pay for those volunteers to maintain at a market rate, all that free stuff would be prohibitively expensive on a per user basis.
These "platforms" start out with an existing open source operating system (BSD or Linux) that already works and has done so for decades. Then they add some features to it that represent a relatively modest one-time modification to the work that has already been done, after which further necessary changes amount to primarily security updates.
Corporations often spend massive resources doing further rearranging on an ongoing basis, but nobody really needs or wants that. If you gave people the choice between the current version of a given platform or the version from 2009 but with security updates, most people would shrug and have no strong preference, if not prefer the older one.
But also, YouTube is a platform and it goes both ways. Why should anybody need a special deal to display a website on their device?
Think about what you're saying dude: Hundreds of tiny distributions rely on unpaid volunteers to run a platform. A platform with questionable quality and no real support.
> A platform with questionable quality and no real support.
The quality of tiny platforms is often higher than the larger ones because their maintainers will actually accept patches and one of the people having the problem will know how to code, whereas consumers reporting bugs to large vendors is more like adults writing letters to Santa Clause.
Anybody can get support for anything by paying someone to support it. For nearly everyone outside of large corporations, the cost of this exceeds the benefit, because 99% of your problems will be solved by whatever comes up when you type the problem into a search engine and the last 1% won't be worth the cost of eliminating.
> A platform with questionable quality and no real support
This applies equally well to the small volunteer platforms and the large commercial ones. The scale is different, sure, but the various app stores and platforms that take a cut aren't providing great commercial support or quality control.
I find it more annoying that standard websites don't just work on a Roku. I'd rather Google didn't have to maintain yet another app for yet another proprietary device, it should all just be build on open standards.
Browsers are god-awful slow on the hardware that ships with smart TVs. I tried it on a LG TV that ships with a browser. Horrid.
I'm still wondering why the keyboard doesn't work for all the different channels/apps on my smartphone remote for the Roku. Streaming via smart TV is a major regression as far as UX.
Yeah, I guess you have a point there. My R-Pi can't do video in the browser in even a remotely usable quality and that cost more than the Roku box I have.
As a workaround, when a video provider is not supported on Roku, what I do is stream video directly from my Android phone to Roku using a free app which is available on both platforms. It is not as convenient as having a dedicated Roku app, but it works.
YouTube app for TVs is a web app everywhere, including Android TV.
The twist? Google requires OEM not to use a standard browser, they require OEMs to use Cobalt, yet another google web browser (whose feature set is too small to actually use as a Web browser)
The issue is that companies like Roku are increasingly making their money by having companies like YouTube TV pay them to carry their apps. Likewise, there are lots of things about these systems that can fall under negotiations. For example, what analytics does Roku get access to for actions taken within apps? Does Roku get insight into what YouTube videos you're watching?
From Roku's blog post, it seems that Google wants a dedicated area in the global search for YouTube results. For example, If you search for "Last Week Tonight", Google wants a YouTube results row showing clips on their service above results from other content platforms like HBO Max. Basically, Google wants to have the placement that search ads get on their platform on Roku.
Previous Roku complaints about Google have included that Google wants all Roku devices to support the AV1 codec - which Google's own Chromecast with Google TV doesn't support.
I think the "dumb and twisted" goes both ways. It's dumb and twisted that Google won't allow Roku devices to run YouTube if Roku doesn't commit that all future Roku devices support AV1 - when even Google's own streaming device doesn't support AV1. It's dumb and twisted that Google wants a dedicated row for YouTube search results rather than neutral search results.
> From Roku's blog post, it seems that Google wants a dedicated area in the global search for YouTube results. For example, If you search for "Last Week Tonight", Google wants a YouTube results row showing clips on their service above results from other content platforms like HBO Max. Basically, Google wants to have the placement that search ads get on their platform on Roku.
Previous discussions[0] suggested that it was simply "where does pressing the remote search button take you". If you're in the YT TV app, Google likely wanted the button to focus the search button within the app, not bring you back to the system-wide search.
It's a great example of what both companies see as their value proposition (to users, and to Wall Street).
Roku: aggregating multiple streaming providers in a provider-agnostic way
Google: centralizing streaming through the YouTube brand (considering it comprises multiple offerings now)
I'm not a huge fan of Roku, due to data collection, but it's apparent who's on the side of the user here. Google/YouTube has finally grown big enough to be everything we hated about legacy content providers.
LG WebOS has a YouTube TV app and the search button in the remote takes you to the global search function. This doesn’t seem to cause any friction between google and LG. Because YouTube TV seems to work everywhere but on roku I tend to blame roku here.
Or LG WebOS is not a big enough market for Google to care about the experience to put their foot down, at that point they’d rather be on the device (and controlling other devices where it counts).
This is all hearsay though and it’s unclear if Google even made such demands to Roku.
LG tvs are quite a bit more expensive than Roku boxes (Roku TVs are made and sold by other parties), so comparing revenue is not very meaningful. Also since home electronics consists of many products, and Roku has essentially a single product.
In most markets, LG and Roku are quite competitive and within a few percentage points of one another. In South America, a less mature but fast growing market, LG has a significant lead over Roku with 23% market share. But in North America, Roku is the market leader with 37% market share, to LG's 4%.
Globally, Roku controls 30% (down from 33% in 2020).
"Home electronics" covers a lot more than streaming, and even a portion of that revenue could account for users with an LG TV who use a Roku device instead of WebOS. It's not a good comparison.
To my knowledge, LG hasn't implied that they want a piece of YouTube's revenue, while the Roku executive team has hinted that capturing some of the revenue from the streaming services is one of their long term goals.
I suspect YouTube's dealmakers think Roku are being sticklers to try to extract a small financial concession, and they're afraid that if they give an inch, it'll open the floodgates and everyone will want a piece of their revenue.
As a user, I see Google's point on this. I often get annoyed when I want to search within the system I'm using and get pushed to a global search, when I want to stay in the app. I'm sure to the app developers this is doubly annoying because it means taking their users away to other platforms. Ironically Google themselves are pretty bad about this - on any given google product it's a roll of the dice what the scope of the "search" button will be.
All of this distracts from the fact that this medium used to be regulated and broadcasters we're required to exhibit fairness, offer news (regulated by fairness), it was free and had minimal ads and was accessible to everyone. We have democratized content creation and lost the good things we developed for "free television," a philosophy of nearly ubiquitous distribution and fairness.
What is the philosophy now? The market is going to yield a spread of reliable information for free? I have to have the means to pay for five different streaming services to get access to all of the valuable content to consider myself informed. It's not just about the latest Marvel movie or Squid Games tripe, it is about an informed citizenry getting access to information. Why is that not part of the debate at all?
This very situation--Google and Netflix fighting over a blanket--is problematic in and of itself and much bigger than both of them put together.
> It's dumb and twisted that Google won't allow Roku devices to run YouTube if Roku doesn't commit that all future Roku devices support AV1 - when even Google's own streaming device doesn't support AV1.
Surely that would only be the case if Google's future streaming devices don't support AV1, not the current one. And they well might tbh.
This is not totally clear. While the only references I can find to this quote are in articles about the situation, I honestly can not tell whether the YouTube app is nonetheless included in terms of availability. It wouldn't surprise me a bit if it was, this kind of thing happens all the time in these disputes. "Agree to our terms or we remove all our channels".
>"We are, however, giving Roku the ability to continue distributing both YouTube and YouTube TV apps to all existing users to make sure they are not impacted."
A few years ago I had a FireTV and Amazon was having the same dispute over youtube. FireTV had a few browser options at the time (Firefox or Amazon Silk) and either one could load youtube. In fact, the youtube app for OTT devices was just a wrapped web experience hosted on youtube.com/tv so it was nearly identical to the app experience.
You can still use YouTube TV (The old leanback interface) if you set your user agent correctly to spoof Tizen Smart TVs. Works almost well enough with keyboard/controller navigation but some keys are mapped incorrectly.
actually Apple is more likely to recognize the bullshit situation we are in with smart tvs these days and just fix it. They will offer a very closed, but functional tv service that has the things you want, with the choices you want to make, without the garbage, for a premium price, accessible on premium hardware (and other devices where possible).
Putting a full-fledged browser into a Roku device would require significantly more powerful hardware and would make it much more expensive as a result. There's also the question of what the UX would be. Let's not oversimplify the solution to complex business problems.
> Roku still allows customers who bought and downloaded the YouTube TV app before it was removed from Roku's platform in April to use it.
Should that not read "Google still allows ..."? Roku would have no interest in blocking their users from using an old version of YouTube TV that predates Google's (allegedly) anti-competitive demands. Google, on the other hand, might see those old non-compliance YouTube TV apps as problematic.
If Roku stopped Roku customers from using YouTube TV, it would force a lot of YouTube TV customers to either a) buy non-Roku devices; b) move to a different service like Hulu with Live TV, DirecTV Stream, Sling, FuboTV, etc.
If Roku removed YouTube TV from their boxes, it would put a lot of pressure on YouTube TV to agree to Roku's terms since they would likely start losing customers fast. Before, if a cable company had a dispute with a network, customers had to wait it out. If Roku has a dispute with YouTube TV, the customers can just switch to one of multiple replacements. That gives the box-providers a lot of leverage. Roku could even work with one of the alternatives to offer a switching bonus. "We're sorry that YouTube TV is being evil. If you switch to Hulu with Live TV, here's $10/mo off for the first year!"
I think you have this backwards. I am more likely to remain loyal to Sling or Youtube TV than I am to Roku or some other smart TV OS. Simple reason: content. Sling doesn’t have regional sports networks from NBC any more, but Youtube TV does. Switching over to Sling is a non-starter. Meanwhile, Roku’s operating system doesn’t really offer something I can’t get elsewhere.
uh... That's the point... since they turned from 'scrappy-start-up' to the global world-dominating conglomerate of 'Umbrella corporation' (uh... 'Alphabet'), they dropped the phrase... Coincidence?
This is just the YouTube TV app, not the regular YouTube app.
Which is extra strange to me, If you have a paid for streaming service, wouldn't you want to be available on every platform you could be?
Good point. I completely missed the first time that it was the "YouTube TV" app, which I have zero interest in. I thought it was about plain "YouTube".
This seems analogous to Microsoft's antitrust suit in the 90s. By forcing unreasonable demands on a competitor, Google improves revenues of their own products/licensed products. And further solidifies Youtube's monopoly market share.
Right, well, that's great if you favor Google being untouched by regulators. Personally, I favor Google being broken up by services where they dominate market share. Search and video would split. And probably, Android would split.
Breaking up Google by services is such a lame last-century approach - it leaves the same network effects, the same middleman position, and the same business dynamics. And then we just have to hope that these independent companies, run by people who previously worked with one another, don't just recreate the same power structure through exclusive contracts and informal wink and nods.
We know the right answer - it's forcing these companies to have publicly accessible, nondiscriminatory APIs for everything that is possible through their proprietary web interfaces or proprietary apps. There should be no private APIs, API keys, or separate contract/account needed to use said API - just the exact same login credentials that a user supplies to the website (if any).
The accompanying software provider restriction is that companies shouldn't be able to take away functionality that has already been sold to users - ie Roku shouldn't be able to threaten Google with removal either. An update should never be mandatory, should always be able to be rolled back, should practically never remove an app, and the bar for maintaining backwards compatibility on an embedded device should be quite high.
This forms a neutral baseline that companies can choose to form additional agreements on top of, without the threat of being extorted as the power dynamic changes.
Websites, especially blogs, should work fine without javascript. There's no reason whatsoever to require javascript for a user to read a few paragraphs.
It's not your website, so who are you to say what is "fine" and what isn't?
It's up to the website owner to determine what the minimum requirements for their site are, and they chose to require Javascript. Judging by the fact that Axios is still up and running, they don't seem to mind their decision.
I mean, saying it impacts hardware you purchased is a stretch. You can just as easily plug in an Android TV box, or an Amazon fire stick, or any number of other products with different interfaces.
Google doesn't "control" the hardware you own, Roku does. Nobody forces people to buy a TV with Roku preinstalled; anyone who did this has consented to having their hardware limited/controlled by Roku.
This isn't to absolve Google, as their behavior is also anticompetitive and generally shady. But saying that Google is the one impacting your hardware is letting Roku off the hook for the part they play in effectively owning your hardware.
Huh? Roku is "hardware you purchased". Sure, you could go out and purchase something else to replace it. I'm not sure why you think that means it doesn't impact the hardware you already have.
Roku is more analogous to software than hardware. My phone OS updates at least every few months, and I don't have a problem with that. In fact, I'd wager that most people don't have a problem with that.
Roku is as much "hardware you purchased" as calling Android "hardware you purchase." Even that isn't a good analogy, because unlike a phone, you can still use your TV without Roku.
When I buy a TV, I'm not "buying" Roku. A lack of access to YouTube in no way impacts the things that make my TV work as a TV. It still turns on and can be used to view any content of my choosing, provided I supply it with the right accessories.
Roku is literally a device that you purchase for using media streaming apps. If there's a TV with Roku built-in, that's only one gateway to their platform and I don't think it's a huge chunk of their userbase.
> Roku sells between 25 and 40 percent of all smart TV's in the US.
Color me extremely dubious. Perhaps Roku TV + Roku devices connected to a TV are about 25-40% of "smart TVs" but I doubt even that.
I have literally never been to a single person's house with a Roku TV in their living room. But a Roku hooked up to their TV? You bet. We have 2, my mom has 1, and several of my friends have them as well.
> Tell them Google is playing evil games with their empire and it's impacting hardware you purchased. Suggest a breakup of Google and YouTube.
Why would a breakup make a difference here? AFAICT the entire deal is limited to YouTube. A breakup would matter if other parts of Google were involved, for example, if Google were threatening to remove Roku from search/ads if they couldn't strike a deal with YouTube. That would be anticompetitive.
This particular deal doesn't come off as anticompetitive to me. It's basically the same problem that Cable TV has with carriage fees and networks, just for streaming services/devices.
Edit: to clarify I don't see this deal as anticompetitive in the monopolistic sense. i.e. I don't see how breaking up Google/YouTube would solve anticompetitive-ness of the deal.
Roku claims that Google are imposing requirements that they don't impose on other TV box producers. And someone elsewhere in the thread said Google were pushing Chromecast at him at the same time. If Google is offering a better YouTube experience on Chromecast than on third-party devices, that seems anticompetitive.
> To be clear, we have never, as they have alleged, made any requests to access user data or interfere with search results. This claim is baseless and false.
So one of them (but most likely both of them) are being dishonest in their PR plays to get the other side to give in to demands.
That blog doesn't address the statements made by Roku.
The Roku blog doesn't load for me because I have javascript disabled. But the axios article states:
> asking Roku to create a dedicated search results row for YouTube within the Roku smart TV interface
The YouTube blog hasn't denied that at all. In fact it practically confirms it:
> Our agreements with partners have technical requirements to ensure a high quality experience on YouTube.
Hah, a "high quality" experience indeed. Except, it's not quite "on youtube" since it's more "on Roku".
The youtube blog also states:
> Roku requested exceptions that would break the YouTube experience and limit our ability to update YouTube in order to fix issues or add new features.
Let users update their YouTube app through Roku app store instead of some shitty auto-update crap that lets Google shovel shit down Roku users.
Note: this isn't meant to defend Google, because their practices are shady and by no means good.
What I find interesting here is that Roku is using business practices similar to Apple and nobody seems to have a problem with it. If I told you that an app store was limiting the types of apps you could add to your device while also controlling the update process, lots of HN readers would call that out. As far as I'm aware, Roku also has a way of capturing subscription revenue as well.
By alk means call out Google for their garbage business practices. But don't let Roku off the hook either.
> What I find interesting here is that Roku is using business practices similar to Apple and nobody seems to have a problem with it.
True. But I would also argue that there's a different scope.
Roku provides a device that allows you to watch video. That's its ultimate purpose.
Apple provides multiple devices; their iOS products are meant more for mobile communication. As such it's much more user-interactive. More user interaction means more "value" inasmuch as there's more opportunities for abuse.
You can use an iOS device to watch video. That's not it's sole (or arguably intended) purpose.
The day that Roku provides chat apps and those chat apps can monitor what you do and where then that will be the day that I would like Roku much less.
This seems like such an unnecessary fine line. The Apple TV box is just for watching video as well - are you fine with the App Store monopoly there? If there were regulation that allowed competing app stores, would you vote for those competitors being locked out of Apple TV apps?
Roku captures subscription and advertising revenue, and also resells/licenses ACR (Automatic Content Recognition) data, aka viewing data. Users can turn this off if needed.
Most platform providers have a certification process for apps on their platforms to ensure that they don't have stability or data issues.
Apple does it. Sony does it. Microsoft does it. And if Google isn't doing it with their own app store, then that raises a lot of questions about Google's commitment to quality software.
They will host your app and let others install it with a private code for free (you don't have to pay to become a developer, and you don't have to pay to use unapproved apps, nor periodically reinstall them, and unapproved apps get treated the same as other apps, and can be auto-updated, etc).
You can (unless this has changed in the past few years since I wrote a Roku app) sideload apps onto your own devices without Roku's involvement.
Developing for a Roku device doesn't require buying anything -- you probably want to buy a Roku to test it out on, but that's not a requirement.
These differences make the proposition much different.
Google doesn't need Roku's permission for writing YouTube unless they want some kind of special treatment outside the published APIs. This part is similar to Apple, where the platform owner can withhold some features from some people.
>I'm not understanding your point here, its the Youtube app. Why is it more on Roku ?
Because one nice feature of Roku is it will search for a program across all of the services. I can search for a movie and see it's $3.99 to rent on Amazon and $4.99 somewhere and free somewhere else. Maybe Google don't like being at the end of the list alphabetically, which might make sense for company that knows the drop off clickthrough rate.
I have no feelings on the matter personally, other than my general dislike of both Roku and YouTube for being more interested in getting paid for reselling my personal data than for delivering me an experience worth paying for. Perhaps someone else will have personal data to share with you. Sorry!
Its a sign of the times. There's a lot of people, especially on the right, whose only experience with "news" is actually editorialized media. There's a "groupthink" and tribal element here too. This person wants to push their anti-Google bias views as fact, when in reality if you dig down into this dispute there's no clear villain.
Googles demand is very reasonable and it is exactly what I (and most other customers, I am sure) expect of the behavior of the software. When I am within an app and do a search I expect the search to be either limited to that app (preferable) or if not, the results of the search that are within the app should be somehow highlighted.
If I pay $40/month for Youtube TV, and go into the Youtube TV app, and search for a show, I am searching for a show within the offerings of the app I am in. I do not want to be offered a show in a yet another app for which I will have to pay yet another monthly fee.
And I especially do not want to be driven towards another service for which I will have to pay another monthly fee, if the show I am searching for is already available in the app I am already paying for and from which I am searching.
Well, if I am within the you tube app, I am searching youtube first and I want the youtube results to be at least presented first. If I want to search all the services, I can search from the roku homescreen.
I am sure of this. I help lead search for Hulu and Disney+ and own a RokuTV. Roku already allows you the option to voice search inside the app you are already in (this has to be enabled by the Roku app developer I believe).
This definitely refers to the universal search Roku offers, and, if true, is an absurd ask on Google's part.
Where are you getting YouTube TV for anywhere near $40/mo? That may have been the price at launch, but it's already climbed more than 50% over the past few years. If you really want live television, I'm not even sure whether cutting the cord and going with an over-the-top package is even cheaper these days.
The only reason it would not be cheaper is if the ISP monopoly, usually coaxial cable internet providers, are bundling internet with TV channel services.
Otherwise it makes no sense that you can add a middleman that needs to employ labor that has to go around to people’s houses and have it be the same cost.
I get this situation is different since YouTube is looking for concessions on functionality, but I find it hard to defend Roku with their triple-dipping scheme. They charge for the device (I paid over $100 for my 4k HDR box), then they display massive ads covering 50% of the screen, then they want a cut of revenue from content providers as well.
Roku burned through a lot of goodwill with their customers during the HBO Max holdout.
Yeah I liked them initially, but have since thrown out all their crap and bought Apple TVs.
Once Apple got Amazon prime streaming roku lost their only differentiating feature. The ads really annoyed me to the extent that I don’t care if they fail.
Roku's differentiating feature has always been simplicity and universal search. Does Apple TV offer universal search across content providers? I'm asking, I don't know, but it's the one feature I can't give up.
Content providers can choose what content to expose to the universal search. Most do, notably Netflix does not, so you can't find Netflix content using Siri.
Android tv does. Which you can get on an Nvidia shield or a cheaper off brand device on Amazon. Just be sure to get one that is certified for Netflix. (I think it's some kind of DRM that has to be on the device for the Netflix app to work).
I really enjoy using JustWatch for this. Their service allows you to search across all the streaming services, and browsing through their suggestions is fun. I also like using it to keep track of what I’ve watched and what I’d like to watch in the future. Their mobile app is pretty solid too.
I have been on Roku forever now and I'm always wondering about these people freaking out about the ads there. It is no where close to the ad intrusion of YouTube. They are not animated, have no sound, and basically stay out of the way. It's like the shinning example of how to do ads.
Roku ads take up the entire right half of the main launch screen, visible every time you turn on the TV or change apps. They've recently started displaying branded ads that are even more intrusive, taking over the entire theme + wallpaper (I recall they did this for Mandalorian, Soul, some other big movie launches).
YouTube ads help fund content creators. Roku ads are being displayed on a stand alone device that I already paid $100 for.
Also, it's possible to disable that home screen ad, if you mess around in the secret settings screen.
Hit Home 5 times.
Hit Up, Right, Down, Left, Up.
You're now on a secret settings screen. I don't know what its purpose is, internal development? Channel development?
Set Image Service to "Dev"
Set Home Screen Ad Banner URL to "Demo2"
Do a Reset/Refresh of cached settings.
Go to main Settings/System and reboot for good measure.
When you get back to the Roku home screen you shouldn't see changing ads anymore, just a static black and white Apple AirPlay image.
I've used this trick on a Roku 3 and a Roku 4 and it worked on both. If there's no "reset / clear cache" option for you on the secret settings screen, it might take a little while for any downloaded ads to expire.
For the first headline, this has to do with channels that are too small to be in the partner program. Youtube still is service provided for free, allowing anyone to upload and share unlimited videos. It's ridiculous to think Youtube shouldn't be allowed to monetize said videos and recoup some money. But also each individual channel here probably makes a few pennies and is not worth it for them to setup a whole contract for.
The latter headline is about a recent issue where some creators force-disable all ads on their channel and instead insert their own sponsor ads in the video. This causes two issues, 1. premium members who pay to not get ads still end up getting them and 2. Youtube basically doesn't get a single penny from that channel. In such cases, I think it's also entirely fair for Youtube to make some money from a video being watched by millions and costing bandwidth.
No they're not. Discrediting creators do not disprove anything stated in the headlines.
> But also each individual channel here probably makes a few pennies and is not worth it for them to setup a whole contract for.
So if YouTube is gathering every penny made by small (or in other words, most) creators, maybe it isn't fair to pretend that YouTube profiting is for some greater good while bashing competitors for doing the same.
> The latter headline is about a recent issue where some creators force-disable all ads on their channel and instead insert their own sponsor ads in the video.
That's an "issue" YouTube would rather people talk about. In reality, it is irrelevant as it applies to every single video uploaded to YouTube. It just serves to unfairly discredit creators. And before you ask, yes, there are people who made the conscious decision of not monetizing their videos that were impacted by YouTube's new policy[1].
Two things can be true at once. Youtube is a platform that needs to make money to exist, and it can also help support creators at the same time. No one claimed it was a charity for creators.
They are perfectly justified in making money off of any video on their platform. It's honestly astonishing to me that you think it's acceptable for a creator to be able to rake in thousands from their video, hosted entirely for free, while also blocking Youtube from making a single penny from the video to pay for the cost of operation.
> you think it's acceptable for a creator to be able to rake in thousands from their video, hosted entirely for free, while also blocking Youtube from making a single penny
Please don’t dictate what I think. That’s not at all what I actually wrote.
Second, if anyone is operating at a loss, it’s the small creators. YouTube, operated by one of richest company on this planet, is the one profiting both directly and indirectly from those creators’ work. I also can’t understand how anyone can claim small creators “only makes a few pennies” while “raking in thousands” at the same time.
> Please don’t dictate what I think. That’s not at all what I actually wrote.
Then please explain because either you agree that Youtube should be allowed to override the "no ads" checkbox for creators that run in-video ads, or you disagree with it. I don't really see a middle ground here.
> I also can’t understand how anyone can claim small creators “only makes a few pennies” while “raking in thousands” at the same time.
It's simple; as with literally everything else Google does, scale. A few pennies, multiplied by millions of small creators, adds up very quickly.
But if they had to setup Creator deals with each of those millions of creators with 1-2 videos, then the economics would simply not work out. It's the same reason they have piss poor customer support on their free products. Those products only work because they have billions of users, but providing customer support to that many people doesn't work financially.
I think the triple dipping is the main issue. If they want a cut from content providers they need to provide something more then just we will have your app.
I didn't know they charged money from app creators to be hosted. I thought they just made their money on hardware!
All roku had to do was build some quality hardware and a decent streaming UI. The only thing that would take money to maintain from a server perspective should be the update servers and software servers.
I saw them as one of the few dedicated streaming devices (next to Shield) for being "provider neutral" - that is, not apple and not Google.
OK. So they are supposed to make money selling one of the most unprofitable commodities on earth...electronic hardware? The only company pulling that off is Apple...and probably just on the iPhone.
I paid $400 for a huge TCL TV. It probably cost $100 just to move it around the globe. There is no money for development or the platform/service in that price.
There's no way that a container full of TVs costs $100 per TV to ship. A bit of quick ddg-ing and it looks like a 40 foot container should be less than $4000 port to port.
With the supply chain problems, prices have gone up - sometimes quite a bit. I saw this article:
>...Container shipping rates from China to the United States have scaled fresh highs above $20,000 per 40-foot box as rising retailer orders ahead of the peak U.S. shopping season add strain to global supply chains.
I suppose the question is, what incentive do Apple or Google or Amazon have to put their content on a competitor's hardware? Moreover, pay to get it on Roku?
People are going to buy the hardware that has the content they want. I feel like the big three are squeezing Roku out.
Should legislation be written to require content and hardware platforms be separate? That Apple TV should have to be available for Shield and Roku, and that Youtube TV be allowed on Apple and Roku?
I'm a long time Roku fan but also feel they're in the wrong here. Mostly I'm angry because I feel captive; I bought my TCL TV explicitly because it had the Roku OS. It's great! Right until it can't show the one content site I most want to see because of some stupid business argument. I feel like a sucker for paying for Roku.
I'm kind of done with Roku. When they were holding customers hostage to squeeze more money out of HBOMax I did a bit of reading about Roku and realized how parasitic they are.
None of the commercial streaming device options are great, but I think my next one will be an Apple TV.
I can't say this for everyone, but a tech consumer has to know that just over $100 does not cover the cost of the hardware. It's got to come from somewhere else. I'm usually not much of an Apple fan, but I just switched to the Apple TV and am really liking it. It certainly seems like charging 2x the price for the hardware removes a lot of the incentive to do all the scammy stuff Ruku is involved in; though I guess I can't know for sure, or know the future.
100 dollars certainly covers the cost of the hardware. These streaming devices use commodity chips and run Linux. This isn’t a crazy R&D project. The only real value-add from Roku is the software.
I also bought an ATV recently and I'm very happy with it.
I still use an Nvidia Shield for Plex though. The ATV is great for streaming platforms, but lacks HDMI audio passthrough which is essential for watching hi quality BluRay rips on a home theater.
ARC/eARC is about the TV sending audio from HDMI devices to another HDMI port where your receiver/soundbar is connected.
HDMI audio passthrough is a feature that allows apps to send any raw encoded audio signal "as is" via the HDMI port (eg: Dolby, DTS, etc) to your receiver that will do the decoding.
The ATV does not support DTS or TrueHD, hence to output audio with those codecs, it needs to be decoded and converted on the fly to a supported format like PCM. Unfortunately this produces all sort of issues (sync, volume, etc).
If it was just as capable, then people would buy Raspberry Pi's.
The problem isn't hardware capability, it's the ecosystem on top of it. Pi doesn't have a robust tv platform and app market system that is built around a remote control. Sure, you can run plex on it but even plex has long abandoned its streaming app platform and decided to roll its own TV service instead... Part of me wishes that Plex would have stuck with it but i guess they realized the Streaming TV problem isn't a software or hardware problem to begin with...
> The problem isn't hardware capability, it's the ecosystem on top of it.
The parent comment stated that the $100 doesn't cover the cost of the hardware. I disagree.
I do think it is perhaps a more reasonable statement to say $100 doesn't cover the cost of the hardware and the software platform on top of it.
I don't think it's right to shove ads down customer's throat on a product that they've paid money for. Whether that's money to buy the hardware and the software platform or whether that's money paid to the subscriptions; in both cases advertisements are the wrong solution to revenue. If software costs money then make that cost up front. Sell the software. Sell updates to the software. Sell a subscription for the software. But don't put ads on it!
I have to chuckle because Google's entire existance has been based on advertising revenue so if you don't like ad supported "Fremium" or "discounted" services, this really is a moot discussion.
I think the comment you're referring to is incorrect in that regard - of course $100 pays (or at least paid pre-chip-shortage) for the bulk-purchased chips and boards in the products, but people buy it because of the streaming services on the box, not because it has a Cortex-A55 in it (although that plays into choosing it over the 1080p model).
It's actually getting quite difficult to buy Raspberry Pi's at the moment, they are out of stock in most places. So people are buying them, but I know that's not what you meant in the context of this conversation.
These accessories are sold in quantities of one, to consumers, and made in relatively smaller batches. All of that gets a lot cheaper if you can injection mold a plastic housing and buy things in hundreds of thousands or millions.
> It certainly seems like charging 2x the price for the hardware removes a lot of the incentive to do all the scammy stuff Ruku is involved in; though I guess I can't know for sure, or know the future.
Software services (i.e. updating iOS/Roku's OS) require on-going maintenance. Apple makes this by charging developers who in turn typically charge the consumers. Roku doesn't do this and hence why it can be hostile to the consumer. It's model is generally to use an ad model instead.
Now people know why there is a (arguably high) tax on subscriptions derived from iOS.
Apple used to sell Apple TV's for $99. It's absolutely possible to make money selling a basic 4K box with a remote for $100 or even $50 these days. You can buy random Chinese emulation consoles and streaming devices for that much where they can only be making money off the hardware.
I am a bit sympathetic to them because that's what the market asks for.
I am looking at the prices of rokus, and my guess is they are losing money on the hardware.
And yes, we should have a completely free (as in speech) device. But if you actually offered it and priced it accordingly, most people would not buy it.
It's dumb but it's what we consumers have voiced with our money.
Roku also takes a cut for every transaction that goes via its platform. If I end up subscribing to HBO via roku, Roku takes a cut too.
On a related note, is it just me that's flummoxed by the lack of Ad disclosures for the Roku ads? I can't seem to find it - and having worked ij tech ads , I find this troubling and concerning.
> then they display massive ads covering 50% of the screen
Stop this. I have multiple Rokus. The % of time I spend on their menu looking at the ads is like 0.0001% of my total time using Roku. In fact, I didn't even notice any ads for months until someone on Reddit complained about it.
It's probably in Roku (and other companies that depend on the big tech monopolies' good behavior) interest to ensure there are alternatives that they can "turn on" with the flip of a switch should Google play unfairly.
For example, I think I remember some improved but unofficial YouTube app (on Github?) that a lot of HN users were sideloading onto their phones. I'm not sure of the details of how it worked, but it probably did something creative with Youtube's general web/http interface and then sliced up the resulting data to create an "improved" interface for phone users.
Roku could fund the developers to ensure this thing worked like gangbusters on its own Roku OS. Should Google start getting greedy, Roku can just tell them to piss off, flip a switch, and now tens of millions of homes with Roku boxes and TVs are now watching Ad-free Youtube via Roku's "custom" version.
They could do the same thing with customized versions of Prime, Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, etc. A company like Roku has enough resources to support the development and ensuing cat-and-mouse game of API tricks that the monopolies' would use to try and disable the usage, but in the end, Chromium is open source, and Roku has absolute control of their own OS and the traffic that goes in and out of their hardware.
The competitive landscape for what is turning out to be the next evolution of in-home video content delivery is just making me realize that the content is not worth the hassle.
I'm not going to replace a $100/mo CATV subscription with 10 (or even 5) $10/mo individual subscriptions, where I have to constantly remember which service provides a particular show.
I'm not going to have multiple dongles and devices to watch content.
I am absolutely not going to rely on smart TV apps to provide a consistent or complete user experience.
I am not going to pay for a service and still be subjected to advertisements.
Somebody ping me when there is actually a logical option for in-home video content delivery to my TV. Until then, I'll either leave it turned off or use traditional options.
I do a round-robin with friends/family where we each pay for a preferred service and share the accounts with everyone in the pool. Every service I've used has been extremely accommodating of this and allows for multiple profiles.
If that's not an option, cancelling/pausing subscriptions should work fine. Once you've watched everything on NF, cancel/pause that and get a HBO Max or something.
To some degree that is a valid approach but the management overhead is simply not worth it to me. I don’t want to deal with having to ‘manage’ subscriptions and such on a month to month or recurring basis.
I just use a VPN, flexget, PLEX, and a torrent client. Automatically downloads new episodes at the resolution I want for the shows I want. I can watch at my leisure and get no ads.
I hate advertisements. I also don’t watch my shows these days, it almost all feels like indoctrination at this point.
Similar approach, but PLEX + Usenet plumbing (Sonarr/Radarr/NZBGet/friends).
I pay for ESPN+ because it is a convenient way to get some live sports content I like, and the quality of the service is really strong. Other networks make it harder, enforce blackouts, have terrible players that spin my fans up – and for that I use IPTV.
Sounds like there is room for a service that aggregates all your streaming services into a single portal. They could even include services you don't want into a 'bundle' for 'free'. Then they could work with ISPs to bundle their content aggregation service with internet for one convenient price.
Then they could make an appliance called a 'cable' box so home users can stream all these 'channels' to any device they want.
> Sounds like there is room for a service that aggregates all your streaming services into a single portal.
Such as Apple App Store? You can search for the media you want to watch in the TV app, it shows up with how much it is, and you click to pay and then watch. I do not understand any aspect of why someone would want to go back to dealing with their not on demand monopoly cable tv provider and cable boxes.
Even if you did want that, seems easier to just sign up for YouTube tv or sling and watch via the app than deal with a cable/satellite tv company.
Eh, there are several pros to the streaming media landscape at least for my use cases. I get that it gets stupid expensive if you're really trying to get access to every possible show on every possible streaming platform all the time, but honestly to me I don't get the need to be able to do that. If I've missed some series on some other streaming platform, its not the end of the world to me.
In my household we really only subscribe to two, maybe three streaming services all at ~$10/mo/ea. The library near us has tons of movies available for streaming with just a library card, and a decent selection of DVDs (been trying to convince them to upgrade to BDs). Each service has more content than I could bother watching in a lifetime. The few times we want to watch something outside of that we'll just rent from a streaming service or if we really care about the media buy it on BD/DVD. So, cost-wise its considerably better.
All of those services really work on just about any device you can buy. Smart TV's have them, Roku's have them, Apple TV's have them, Nvidia Shield's have them, you can watch them on Chromecast, watch them on a laptop, watch them on a tablet, watch them on a phone, whatever. Practically any streaming device you can buy anywhere from $10-200 will play all of those streaming services, so its not like I'm juggling multiple different inputs for some screen. An old Chromecast in the kitchen, a Roku in the living room, my desktop in the office, a tablet in the sitting room, my phone on the bus or train or at a picnic table on lunch break at work.
This is a far cry from having to rent specific crappy power-hungry hardware at $15+/mo for each screen, $100+/mo long term contracts for service to be locked to those boxes, and then only really be able to watch it at home. Hopefully all your recordings are set and you haven't overscheduled your dual or quad tuner cable box making you miss something. Good luck catching a series from the beginning without a time machine.
The only thing I really miss from this setup is seeing NHL games, which is now stupid expensive behind AT&T TV. I used to stomache paying for Hulu Live TV when hockey was in season, but AT&T TV wants >$100/mo to get the package to watch that. I'll just go over to a friend's place or a sports bar to scratch that itch.
Same, Nebula/Curiosity Stream, plus YouTube and Crunchyroll (free tier) is more than enough to entertain me when I need it. I don't want to buy content by the "channel" and I'll do literally whatever I need to for it to stay that way.
If you just want to replace cable, why would you need so many services? Surely one or two of them has enough to watch. Probably more than you used to find in 30-100 channels, and on demand, too.
I haven't brought one myself, but wouldn't an Apple Tv solve the consistent and complete user experience? Plus they are big enough that Google can't bully them like they can Roku.
Heck they probably have search across all the services you subscribe to so you don't have to remember which services have what stuff.
They do have a universal search but some of the big players like Netflix don't support it which meant that when I had an Apple TV I never really used it. The interface isn't that consistent either because app developers can pretty much do what they want so Netflix, YouTube etc. have the same UI they have other platforms for the most part which is different from Apple's. Of course Apple does the same thing and the Apple TV app on my FireTV works quite a bit differently from other apps UIwise.
This whole situation really feels like Google has their head stuck up their ass. People are just as likely to leave Roku, as they are to leave YouTube TV. Their subscriber numbers can't be strong enough to justify such idiotic behavior. To me, this sounds like a middle manager gone rogue, and no one higher up has stepped in yet and said "Ok, you shot your shot, but Roku called your bluff, you've taken this way too far."
If this is really just about additional featured slots for Youtube TV in the Roku home screen. Apple would never cave to that. Xbox, Amazon, PlayStation, none of these companies would cave and give YouTube special treatment. Roku shouldn't either.
I had read something earlier which suggested there was also an issue with Roku selling devices with processors too underpowered for some new compression algorithm YouTube wanted to use. If this is the case, this feels more reasonable to me, and I'd be less inclined to pass judgement. At the end of the day, this would be Roku trying to save money and move the costs on to Google, which isn't equitable.
It's doubly weird, because YouTube TV is literally just a side project -- There's at least a 50% chance Google just totally shuts down YouTube TV within the next five years. (Like they already did with Google Play Music, and Google Play Movies + TV once before).
Google's going to war with Roku over something that Google doesn't care about at all (it's one minor ancillary line of business to them), but is Roku's main and only meaningful line of business.
If you want to be locked into a single vendor, you can already buy Google TV from Sony or TCL (where this vendor-lock-in is guaranteed). The whole point of Roku is that it's independent, it's not operated by any one streaming/media service, it's not a "Google TV" or an "Apple TV" or a "PlayStation TV" or whatever.
Roku has to fight this, tooth-and-nail, or all other services on the Roku platform will demand the same, and totally destroy the entire Roku product lineup.
Right, and that's why I really can't believe this spat has the full force of Alphabet Inc behind it. I think its just Google's highly independent culture taken to the extreme with an idiotic, toxic, vengeful middle manager. Its a form of small dog syndrome; blowing their chest up as a compensation mechanism for how much of a side-project YouTube TV is for Alphabet, a desperate attempt to get additional promotion from Roku to prop up falling subscriber growth.
In most other companies, everything else being equal: someone higher up would have already stepped in and said "YouTube TV isn't worth it, you need to end this, you're sullying the corporate brand." But that's not really how Google operates; at least, not yet.
Actually its not true at all. There is a real and growing market for people who just want old cable packages but served over the internet (something Google knows about). They have the cash and technical chops to make the best service for this. It aligns with some other things (Stadia, Youtube, Android TV/cast) to round out a total home/living room offering. Home is core for google (hubs, cams, routers, etc) and they do well at it.
Also, the competition is faltering. SlingTV lost NBC regional sports networks in April. I now must move over to Youtube TV. I think the competition gets stronger here, including Apple getting into the space with a live TV offering at some point. Amazon probably too with its sports rights.
Youtube TV is both important for Google, but also a way they can make Roku weaker. At the end of the day, I don’t think Google, Amazon or Apple really want another strong competitor in the living room. Don’t give them youtube TV.
>Like they already did with Google Play Music, and Google Play Movies + TV once before
GPM didn't get shut down, it got switched over to YTM. If you want to use that as an example for what might happen to YTTV, then it'd be YTTV getting moved over to an inferior rebrand that occupies the same space. And I don't know what you're talking about with Play Movies and TV. It's still there.
The shutdown of Google Play Movies and TV and the stuffing of parts of that system into "YouTube TV", is sort of the original catalyst for how Roku and YouTube TV got into this fight in the first place.
"middle managers" are not negotiating these partnership deals.
I don't really buy the compression algorithm thing either - surely they make more off of ads than the savings that would be generated from better compression.
pretty sure this is just hardball over revenue sharing, data sharing, and technical requirements...
The “head of YouTube” is Susan Wojcicki [1]. Her title is CEO of YouTube, she reports directly to the CEO of Alphabet, Sundar Pichai [2], and is frequently floated as a candidate for next CEO of Alphabet if Mr. Pichai left. She has thousands of people in her reporting chain. She is about as far from a middle-manager as you are from being Alphabet’s CEO. Please inform yourself a bit more before making completely outlandish statements.
Hah, Wojcicki being the next CEO would be the end of Google. Who needs a CEO that is despised in their organisation and utterly ignorant to what is happening on YT?
This whole situation really feels like Roku has their head stuck up their ass. People are just as likely to leave Roku, as they are to leave YouTube TV. Their customer numbers can't be strong enough to justify such idiotic behavior. To me, this sounds like a middle manager gone rogue, and no one higher up has stepped in yet and said "Ok, you shot your shot, but YouTube called your bluff, you've taken this way too far."
This kind of response appears immature. You could have said the equivalent with something like “you could swap Roku and YouTube TV etc” and it wouldn’t appear petty.
No, I can easily drop YouTube TV. Roku is built into each of my 3 TVs. I'm glad this was about Youtube TV, if it ws the Youtube app I'd have a problem.
I thought the same thing, but apparently the article mentions that the base YouTube app is also affected by this spat:
"The two companies had a December deadline for renegotiation, but sources say it hasn’t been met, and as a result, new Roku devices will continue to be unable to download YouTube or YouTube TV apps."
Shit like this is why I just run a web browser on a windows PC hooked up to the TV. There is no other platform out there that can handle every streaming service and local media.
Could we get a moderator to change the title to say YouTube TV instead of YouTube? The dispute between Roku and Google has nothing to do with the latter, and is confusing to readers.
Edit: I did not realize that the base YouTube app was specifically mentioned in the article, alongside YTTV. That's surprising and is a bigger deal than I'd thought before.
"The two companies had a December deadline for a renegotiation, but sources say it hasn’t been met, and as a result, new Roku devices will continue to be unable to download YouTube or YouTube TV apps."
There is honestly only one good media box left and it's the Apple TV. The only ads it has is for the stupid Apple TV+ program but beyond that it supports every streaming service. I've dumped all my "it just works" rokus for Apple TVs. The nvidia shield was doing good but google got their hands on it and it's full of ads now too. The new AppleTV remote is much better and so far has passed all wife tests.
The service in question is YouTubeTV, which is basically a replacement for traditional cable. Local channels, things like TNT, CNN, etc.
I had the service for a while, solely for local news. They bumped the price up a few times, and it was just too expensive at $65/month.
I ended up buying a Tablo device instead. A bit of fiddling with different antennas, but it works great. There is the up-front cost of ~$250 or so for the device, decent antenna, and hard drive. Then $5/month after that, or $10/month if you want the commercial skip. I'm happy with it. You can access it from a Roku app, so the end experience for local news is pretty much the same as it was with YouTubeTV.
I've been considering getting a TV tuner card so I can use Plex's DVR/live TV features. I haven't found a reason to actually do it yet though; after all, if I even want to watch the local news I can just go to their website.
This is no different than when a cable company (usually temporarily) drops a major media provider due to failed contract negotiations.
The only difference here is that the specifics of the contract is being waved about in public to get ahead of customer fallout to losing access to the YouTube channel.
This is literally the modern day equivalent to the classic pissing matches between cable/satellite operators and station groups. Both sides are full of shit, honestly.
Roku is a advertising company. Google is a advertising company. They are fighting over who gets to sell you.
This is why I have chosen to spend the extra money and use a Apple TV. Google still spies on my content when I am in their app, but at least apple is not using analytics and screenshots to figure out what I am watching and sell it others.
Welcome to the world where I can just do wtf I like with the software at my disposal without middlemen trying to get their cut ...
wakes up
Don't worry about it, Roku ... I use your devices around the house and if I ever need a youtube on bigscreen, I just share direct to the "smart" TV instead ...
Hey youtube, or whoever is causing this, you're just making yourselves look dumb to consumers who will either be angry at your or just bypass your dumb stance on the matter.
Edit: I remember the old days with disdain, but does anyone miss the Microsoft days? I know I know ... but at least I could force my machine to do whatever the hell I wanted. Download an .exe and get on with it ... phew, actually, I'm forgetting the bad things ... but at least it was "open" and I had control. Kind of. You know what I mean.
> Don't worry about it, Roku ... I use your devices around the house and if I ever need a youtube on bigscreen, I just share direct to the "smart" TV instead ...
That is what youtube wants and not what Roku wants though. Roku gets paid when you use youtube there, if you bypass the Roku ecosystem like this to go directly to Youtube then Youtube won.
I get that Sonos, Roku, etc are in a tough spot but this business is structurally to be a good, cheap, dumb terminal. It's no use for Roku to try and get in the way at this point, it just reinforces incentives for players to undercut them with branded sticks (Chromecast, fire tv, apple TV...)
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 307 ms ] threadAlso dumb and twisted that as a paying youtube subscriber, I could buy a computer (a roku) and not be allowed to access youtube on it.
Do better, tech.
So, Do better, people.
Roku, like Apple, like Google, like Salesforce, like Patreon, like all platforms with payments, rely on their cut of the IAP to make money.
Roku, like Google, like Patreon, like all other platforms that are also on platforms, dont want to pay X% to the platform, they want a special rate.
I agree that Roku, time and time again, has been too aggressive in their tactics to extract maximum profit from their users via the apps they consume (HBO disappeared for a while last year, and I think Showtime did as well), but they do have COSTS they have to cover, and profits they have to make to maximize value to shareholders.
Is this a perfect system, no, but it is the system that exists currently.
These "platforms" start out with an existing open source operating system (BSD or Linux) that already works and has done so for decades. Then they add some features to it that represent a relatively modest one-time modification to the work that has already been done, after which further necessary changes amount to primarily security updates.
Corporations often spend massive resources doing further rearranging on an ongoing basis, but nobody really needs or wants that. If you gave people the choice between the current version of a given platform or the version from 2009 but with security updates, most people would shrug and have no strong preference, if not prefer the older one.
But also, YouTube is a platform and it goes both ways. Why should anybody need a special deal to display a website on their device?
Yeah, it isn't expensive under those criteria.
The quality of tiny platforms is often higher than the larger ones because their maintainers will actually accept patches and one of the people having the problem will know how to code, whereas consumers reporting bugs to large vendors is more like adults writing letters to Santa Clause.
Anybody can get support for anything by paying someone to support it. For nearly everyone outside of large corporations, the cost of this exceeds the benefit, because 99% of your problems will be solved by whatever comes up when you type the problem into a search engine and the last 1% won't be worth the cost of eliminating.
This applies equally well to the small volunteer platforms and the large commercial ones. The scale is different, sure, but the various app stores and platforms that take a cut aren't providing great commercial support or quality control.
I'm still wondering why the keyboard doesn't work for all the different channels/apps on my smartphone remote for the Roku. Streaming via smart TV is a major regression as far as UX.
As a workaround, when a video provider is not supported on Roku, what I do is stream video directly from my Android phone to Roku using a free app which is available on both platforms. It is not as convenient as having a dedicated Roku app, but it works.
The twist? Google requires OEM not to use a standard browser, they require OEMs to use Cobalt, yet another google web browser (whose feature set is too small to actually use as a Web browser)
From Roku's blog post, it seems that Google wants a dedicated area in the global search for YouTube results. For example, If you search for "Last Week Tonight", Google wants a YouTube results row showing clips on their service above results from other content platforms like HBO Max. Basically, Google wants to have the placement that search ads get on their platform on Roku.
Previous Roku complaints about Google have included that Google wants all Roku devices to support the AV1 codec - which Google's own Chromecast with Google TV doesn't support.
I think the "dumb and twisted" goes both ways. It's dumb and twisted that Google won't allow Roku devices to run YouTube if Roku doesn't commit that all future Roku devices support AV1 - when even Google's own streaming device doesn't support AV1. It's dumb and twisted that Google wants a dedicated row for YouTube search results rather than neutral search results.
Previous discussions[0] suggested that it was simply "where does pressing the remote search button take you". If you're in the YT TV app, Google likely wanted the button to focus the search button within the app, not bring you back to the system-wide search.
0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26944837
Roku: aggregating multiple streaming providers in a provider-agnostic way
Google: centralizing streaming through the YouTube brand (considering it comprises multiple offerings now)
I'm not a huge fan of Roku, due to data collection, but it's apparent who's on the side of the user here. Google/YouTube has finally grown big enough to be everything we hated about legacy content providers.
This is all hearsay though and it’s unclear if Google even made such demands to Roku.
Globally, Roku controls 30% (down from 33% in 2020).
https://www.protocol.com/roku-global-expansion-conviva-data
"Home electronics" covers a lot more than streaming, and even a portion of that revenue could account for users with an LG TV who use a Roku device instead of WebOS. It's not a good comparison.
I suspect YouTube's dealmakers think Roku are being sticklers to try to extract a small financial concession, and they're afraid that if they give an inch, it'll open the floodgates and everyone will want a piece of their revenue.
If Google wants to move to AV1 it makes sense to sign forward thinking contracts even if they have existing hardware that doesn't support it.
What is the philosophy now? The market is going to yield a spread of reliable information for free? I have to have the means to pay for five different streaming services to get access to all of the valuable content to consider myself informed. It's not just about the latest Marvel movie or Squid Games tripe, it is about an informed citizenry getting access to information. Why is that not part of the debate at all?
This very situation--Google and Netflix fighting over a blanket--is problematic in and of itself and much bigger than both of them put together.
Surely that would only be the case if Google's future streaming devices don't support AV1, not the current one. And they well might tbh.
>"We are, however, giving Roku the ability to continue distributing both YouTube and YouTube TV apps to all existing users to make sure they are not impacted."
Though, I can understand in principle why they don't do this, why give traffic to jerks?
But these companies are moving steadily towards locking things down behind anticompetitive agreements.
Should that not read "Google still allows ..."? Roku would have no interest in blocking their users from using an old version of YouTube TV that predates Google's (allegedly) anti-competitive demands. Google, on the other hand, might see those old non-compliance YouTube TV apps as problematic.
Am I missing something here?
If Roku removed YouTube TV from their boxes, it would put a lot of pressure on YouTube TV to agree to Roku's terms since they would likely start losing customers fast. Before, if a cable company had a dispute with a network, customers had to wait it out. If Roku has a dispute with YouTube TV, the customers can just switch to one of multiple replacements. That gives the box-providers a lot of leverage. Roku could even work with one of the alternatives to offer a switching bonus. "We're sorry that YouTube TV is being evil. If you switch to Hulu with Live TV, here's $10/mo off for the first year!"
If YouTube disappeared from my Roku I would go buy a device that does support it. At the moment there isn't much competition in the YouTube space.
If Netflix or Amazon Prime disappeared from my Roku, I wouldn't be as bothered as they are more fungible services.
Doesn’t anyone have an idea on this?
The only demand that Google hasn't refuted is requiring AV1 codec support. I can't find any specifics about search manipulation or user data access.
Also even if they toss the Roku platform for TV, they keep the subscription revenue for YouTube TV - users will just use another device.
Assuming Google doesn't want to be broken up, poking the bear with publicly anti-competitive behavior seems like a bad choice.
We know the right answer - it's forcing these companies to have publicly accessible, nondiscriminatory APIs for everything that is possible through their proprietary web interfaces or proprietary apps. There should be no private APIs, API keys, or separate contract/account needed to use said API - just the exact same login credentials that a user supplies to the website (if any).
The accompanying software provider restriction is that companies shouldn't be able to take away functionality that has already been sold to users - ie Roku shouldn't be able to threaten Google with removal either. An update should never be mandatory, should always be able to be rolled back, should practically never remove an app, and the bar for maintaining backwards compatibility on an embedded device should be quite high.
This forms a neutral baseline that companies can choose to form additional agreements on top of, without the threat of being extorted as the power dynamic changes.
"First, Google continues to interfere with Roku’s independent search results, requiring that we preference YouTube over other content providers"
"Second, Google discriminates against Roku by demanding search, voice, and data features that they do not insist on from other streaming platforms."
I would be much more comfortable if the headline says, "Google made unreasonable demands on Roku to strike a YouTube deal"
It's up to the website owner to determine what the minimum requirements for their site are, and they chose to require Javascript. Judging by the fact that Axios is still up and running, they don't seem to mind their decision.
I prefer to use java with mine, though I've heard there's a javascript-compatible language that might target your use case.
Do me a favor. Look up your representative and call or email them.
https://www.house.gov/representatives/find-your-representati...
Tell them Google is playing evil games with their empire and it's impacting hardware you purchased. Suggest a breakup of Google and YouTube.
Google doesn't "control" the hardware you own, Roku does. Nobody forces people to buy a TV with Roku preinstalled; anyone who did this has consented to having their hardware limited/controlled by Roku.
This isn't to absolve Google, as their behavior is also anticompetitive and generally shady. But saying that Google is the one impacting your hardware is letting Roku off the hook for the part they play in effectively owning your hardware.
Roku is as much "hardware you purchased" as calling Android "hardware you purchase." Even that isn't a good analogy, because unlike a phone, you can still use your TV without Roku.
When I buy a TV, I'm not "buying" Roku. A lack of access to YouTube in no way impacts the things that make my TV work as a TV. It still turns on and can be used to view any content of my choosing, provided I supply it with the right accessories.
Color me extremely dubious. Perhaps Roku TV + Roku devices connected to a TV are about 25-40% of "smart TVs" but I doubt even that.
I have literally never been to a single person's house with a Roku TV in their living room. But a Roku hooked up to their TV? You bet. We have 2, my mom has 1, and several of my friends have them as well.
Why would a breakup make a difference here? AFAICT the entire deal is limited to YouTube. A breakup would matter if other parts of Google were involved, for example, if Google were threatening to remove Roku from search/ads if they couldn't strike a deal with YouTube. That would be anticompetitive.
This particular deal doesn't come off as anticompetitive to me. It's basically the same problem that Cable TV has with carriage fees and networks, just for streaming services/devices.
Edit: to clarify I don't see this deal as anticompetitive in the monopolistic sense. i.e. I don't see how breaking up Google/YouTube would solve anticompetitive-ness of the deal.
> To be clear, we have never, as they have alleged, made any requests to access user data or interfere with search results. This claim is baseless and false.
So one of them (but most likely both of them) are being dishonest in their PR plays to get the other side to give in to demands.
https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/update-our-youtube-tv-m...
The Roku blog doesn't load for me because I have javascript disabled. But the axios article states:
> asking Roku to create a dedicated search results row for YouTube within the Roku smart TV interface
The YouTube blog hasn't denied that at all. In fact it practically confirms it:
> Our agreements with partners have technical requirements to ensure a high quality experience on YouTube.
Hah, a "high quality" experience indeed. Except, it's not quite "on youtube" since it's more "on Roku".
The youtube blog also states:
> Roku requested exceptions that would break the YouTube experience and limit our ability to update YouTube in order to fix issues or add new features.
Let users update their YouTube app through Roku app store instead of some shitty auto-update crap that lets Google shovel shit down Roku users.
What I find interesting here is that Roku is using business practices similar to Apple and nobody seems to have a problem with it. If I told you that an app store was limiting the types of apps you could add to your device while also controlling the update process, lots of HN readers would call that out. As far as I'm aware, Roku also has a way of capturing subscription revenue as well.
By alk means call out Google for their garbage business practices. But don't let Roku off the hook either.
True. But I would also argue that there's a different scope.
Roku provides a device that allows you to watch video. That's its ultimate purpose.
Apple provides multiple devices; their iOS products are meant more for mobile communication. As such it's much more user-interactive. More user interaction means more "value" inasmuch as there's more opportunities for abuse.
You can use an iOS device to watch video. That's not it's sole (or arguably intended) purpose.
The day that Roku provides chat apps and those chat apps can monitor what you do and where then that will be the day that I would like Roku much less.
ACR Service Policy: https://docs.roku.com/published/acrservicepolicy/en/us
Roku is not alone in doing this, of course. Every major TV manufacturer in the US does this.
https://www.consumerreports.org/privacy/how-to-turn-off-smar...
Apple does it. Sony does it. Microsoft does it. And if Google isn't doing it with their own app store, then that raises a lot of questions about Google's commitment to quality software.
They will host your app and let others install it with a private code for free (you don't have to pay to become a developer, and you don't have to pay to use unapproved apps, nor periodically reinstall them, and unapproved apps get treated the same as other apps, and can be auto-updated, etc).
You can (unless this has changed in the past few years since I wrote a Roku app) sideload apps onto your own devices without Roku's involvement.
Developing for a Roku device doesn't require buying anything -- you probably want to buy a Roku to test it out on, but that's not a requirement.
These differences make the proposition much different.
Google doesn't need Roku's permission for writing YouTube unless they want some kind of special treatment outside the published APIs. This part is similar to Apple, where the platform owner can withhold some features from some people.
>asking Roku to create a dedicated search results row for YouTube within the Roku smart TV interface
>we have never, as they have alleged, made any requests to access user data or interfere with search results.
Doesn't this contradict the idea that Roku claims they are asking for special search results.
>Hah, a "high quality" experience indeed. Except, it's not quite "on youtube" since it's more "on Roku".
I'm not understanding your point here, its the Youtube app. Why is it more on Roku ?
>crap that lets Google shovel shit down Roku users.
If you don't like youtube don't use it.
Because one nice feature of Roku is it will search for a program across all of the services. I can search for a movie and see it's $3.99 to rent on Amazon and $4.99 somewhere and free somewhere else. Maybe Google don't like being at the end of the list alphabetically, which might make sense for company that knows the drop off clickthrough rate.
This is a he said/she said dispute. Taking either side's statements at face value is just foolish.
See also above, where YouTube doesn’t contest Roku’s core claims when given opportunity to do so.
This submission would have been better as a blog post by a third party analyzing both of their statements.
You are unhappy that a blog post from April does not respond to claims made today?
(Disclosure: I work for Google, speaking only for myself)
If I pay $40/month for Youtube TV, and go into the Youtube TV app, and search for a show, I am searching for a show within the offerings of the app I am in. I do not want to be offered a show in a yet another app for which I will have to pay yet another monthly fee.
And I especially do not want to be driven towards another service for which I will have to pay another monthly fee, if the show I am searching for is already available in the app I am already paying for and from which I am searching.
If the content is paid on youtube, but available for free through another subscription service that Roku knows you have?
First, Google continues to interfere with Roku’s independent search results, requiring that we preference YouTube over other content providers.
That's Roku's own search app Google are trying to influence.
https://www.roku.com/blog/en-gb/update-on-youtube-tv
This definitely refers to the universal search Roku offers, and, if true, is an absurd ask on Google's part.
Where are you getting YouTube TV for anywhere near $40/mo? That may have been the price at launch, but it's already climbed more than 50% over the past few years. If you really want live television, I'm not even sure whether cutting the cord and going with an over-the-top package is even cheaper these days.
Otherwise it makes no sense that you can add a middleman that needs to employ labor that has to go around to people’s houses and have it be the same cost.
Roku burned through a lot of goodwill with their customers during the HBO Max holdout.
Once Apple got Amazon prime streaming roku lost their only differentiating feature. The ads really annoyed me to the extent that I don’t care if they fail.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208083
For me if I'm paying for something I don't want ads. If you charge me and then also double dip with ads I'll try to find something else that doesn't.
YouTube ads help fund content creators. Roku ads are being displayed on a stand alone device that I already paid $100 for.
Hit Home 5 times. Hit Up, Right, Down, Left, Up. You're now on a secret settings screen. I don't know what its purpose is, internal development? Channel development? Set Image Service to "Dev" Set Home Screen Ad Banner URL to "Demo2" Do a Reset/Refresh of cached settings. Go to main Settings/System and reboot for good measure.
When you get back to the Roku home screen you shouldn't see changing ads anymore, just a static black and white Apple AirPlay image.
I feel that this is being too generous to YouTube considering things like these:
"YouTube will run ads on some creator videos, but it won’t give them any of the revenue" [1]
"YouTube Will Now Show Ads On All Videos Even If Creators Don’t Want Them" [2]
[1]: https://www.theverge.com/2020/11/18/21573937/youtube-ads-cre...
[2]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2020/11/18/youtube...
For the first headline, this has to do with channels that are too small to be in the partner program. Youtube still is service provided for free, allowing anyone to upload and share unlimited videos. It's ridiculous to think Youtube shouldn't be allowed to monetize said videos and recoup some money. But also each individual channel here probably makes a few pennies and is not worth it for them to setup a whole contract for.
The latter headline is about a recent issue where some creators force-disable all ads on their channel and instead insert their own sponsor ads in the video. This causes two issues, 1. premium members who pay to not get ads still end up getting them and 2. Youtube basically doesn't get a single penny from that channel. In such cases, I think it's also entirely fair for Youtube to make some money from a video being watched by millions and costing bandwidth.
No they're not. Discrediting creators do not disprove anything stated in the headlines.
> But also each individual channel here probably makes a few pennies and is not worth it for them to setup a whole contract for.
So if YouTube is gathering every penny made by small (or in other words, most) creators, maybe it isn't fair to pretend that YouTube profiting is for some greater good while bashing competitors for doing the same.
> The latter headline is about a recent issue where some creators force-disable all ads on their channel and instead insert their own sponsor ads in the video.
That's an "issue" YouTube would rather people talk about. In reality, it is irrelevant as it applies to every single video uploaded to YouTube. It just serves to unfairly discredit creators. And before you ask, yes, there are people who made the conscious decision of not monetizing their videos that were impacted by YouTube's new policy[1].
[1]: https://larryjordan.com/articles/youtube-filmmakers-presumed...
They are perfectly justified in making money off of any video on their platform. It's honestly astonishing to me that you think it's acceptable for a creator to be able to rake in thousands from their video, hosted entirely for free, while also blocking Youtube from making a single penny from the video to pay for the cost of operation.
Please don’t dictate what I think. That’s not at all what I actually wrote.
Second, if anyone is operating at a loss, it’s the small creators. YouTube, operated by one of richest company on this planet, is the one profiting both directly and indirectly from those creators’ work. I also can’t understand how anyone can claim small creators “only makes a few pennies” while “raking in thousands” at the same time.
Then please explain because either you agree that Youtube should be allowed to override the "no ads" checkbox for creators that run in-video ads, or you disagree with it. I don't really see a middle ground here.
> I also can’t understand how anyone can claim small creators “only makes a few pennies” while “raking in thousands” at the same time.
It's simple; as with literally everything else Google does, scale. A few pennies, multiplied by millions of small creators, adds up very quickly.
But if they had to setup Creator deals with each of those millions of creators with 1-2 videos, then the economics would simply not work out. It's the same reason they have piss poor customer support on their free products. Those products only work because they have billions of users, but providing customer support to that many people doesn't work financially.
All roku had to do was build some quality hardware and a decent streaming UI. The only thing that would take money to maintain from a server perspective should be the update servers and software servers.
I saw them as one of the few dedicated streaming devices (next to Shield) for being "provider neutral" - that is, not apple and not Google.
I paid $400 for a huge TCL TV. It probably cost $100 just to move it around the globe. There is no money for development or the platform/service in that price.
We're spoiled..
>...Container shipping rates from China to the United States have scaled fresh highs above $20,000 per 40-foot box as rising retailer orders ahead of the peak U.S. shopping season add strain to global supply chains.
https://www.reuters.com/business/china-us-container-shipping...
People are going to buy the hardware that has the content they want. I feel like the big three are squeezing Roku out.
Should legislation be written to require content and hardware platforms be separate? That Apple TV should have to be available for Shield and Roku, and that Youtube TV be allowed on Apple and Roku?
There are literally thousands of platforms and devices, all with little bespoke niggles. Who's going to pay for that?
None of the commercial streaming device options are great, but I think my next one will be an Apple TV.
You bought a TV and expected it to not have its features changed. That sounds like a very reasonable expectation.
I still use an Nvidia Shield for Plex though. The ATV is great for streaming platforms, but lacks HDMI audio passthrough which is essential for watching hi quality BluRay rips on a home theater.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207117
ARC/eARC is about the TV sending audio from HDMI devices to another HDMI port where your receiver/soundbar is connected.
HDMI audio passthrough is a feature that allows apps to send any raw encoded audio signal "as is" via the HDMI port (eg: Dolby, DTS, etc) to your receiver that will do the decoding.
The ATV does not support DTS or TrueHD, hence to output audio with those codecs, it needs to be decoded and converted on the fly to a supported format like PCM. Unfortunately this produces all sort of issues (sync, volume, etc).
Nonsense. A raspberry pi costs far less and is, arguably, just as capable.
The problem isn't hardware capability, it's the ecosystem on top of it. Pi doesn't have a robust tv platform and app market system that is built around a remote control. Sure, you can run plex on it but even plex has long abandoned its streaming app platform and decided to roll its own TV service instead... Part of me wishes that Plex would have stuck with it but i guess they realized the Streaming TV problem isn't a software or hardware problem to begin with...
The parent comment stated that the $100 doesn't cover the cost of the hardware. I disagree.
I do think it is perhaps a more reasonable statement to say $100 doesn't cover the cost of the hardware and the software platform on top of it.
I don't think it's right to shove ads down customer's throat on a product that they've paid money for. Whether that's money to buy the hardware and the software platform or whether that's money paid to the subscriptions; in both cases advertisements are the wrong solution to revenue. If software costs money then make that cost up front. Sell the software. Sell updates to the software. Sell a subscription for the software. But don't put ads on it!
Last I checked, there wasn't any player capable of doing HDR10 HEVC either, but maybe that has changed.
I like the rpi but I don't think its as capable as people are making it out to be.
Software services (i.e. updating iOS/Roku's OS) require on-going maintenance. Apple makes this by charging developers who in turn typically charge the consumers. Roku doesn't do this and hence why it can be hostile to the consumer. It's model is generally to use an ad model instead.
Now people know why there is a (arguably high) tax on subscriptions derived from iOS.
It’s like Visa, restaurants will charge all customers including cash paying ones more too. So the Visa card holder, isn’t incentivized not to use it.
I am looking at the prices of rokus, and my guess is they are losing money on the hardware.
And yes, we should have a completely free (as in speech) device. But if you actually offered it and priced it accordingly, most people would not buy it.
It's dumb but it's what we consumers have voiced with our money.
But then... I bought the ad version, not for price but because it had the pretty colors and I don't like using cases on kindles anymore.
Roku also takes a cut for every transaction that goes via its platform. If I end up subscribing to HBO via roku, Roku takes a cut too.
On a related note, is it just me that's flummoxed by the lack of Ad disclosures for the Roku ads? I can't seem to find it - and having worked ij tech ads , I find this troubling and concerning.
Stop this. I have multiple Rokus. The % of time I spend on their menu looking at the ads is like 0.0001% of my total time using Roku. In fact, I didn't even notice any ads for months until someone on Reddit complained about it.
Well, if you DO pay for the product, you are STILL the product.
For example, I think I remember some improved but unofficial YouTube app (on Github?) that a lot of HN users were sideloading onto their phones. I'm not sure of the details of how it worked, but it probably did something creative with Youtube's general web/http interface and then sliced up the resulting data to create an "improved" interface for phone users.
Roku could fund the developers to ensure this thing worked like gangbusters on its own Roku OS. Should Google start getting greedy, Roku can just tell them to piss off, flip a switch, and now tens of millions of homes with Roku boxes and TVs are now watching Ad-free Youtube via Roku's "custom" version.
They could do the same thing with customized versions of Prime, Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, etc. A company like Roku has enough resources to support the development and ensuing cat-and-mouse game of API tricks that the monopolies' would use to try and disable the usage, but in the end, Chromium is open source, and Roku has absolute control of their own OS and the traffic that goes in and out of their hardware.
Previous discussions:
"Roku says it may lose YouTube TV app after Google made anti-competitive demands " https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26942862
"An update to our YouTube TV members on Roku" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26996972
I'm not going to replace a $100/mo CATV subscription with 10 (or even 5) $10/mo individual subscriptions, where I have to constantly remember which service provides a particular show.
I'm not going to have multiple dongles and devices to watch content.
I am absolutely not going to rely on smart TV apps to provide a consistent or complete user experience.
I am not going to pay for a service and still be subjected to advertisements.
Somebody ping me when there is actually a logical option for in-home video content delivery to my TV. Until then, I'll either leave it turned off or use traditional options.
If that's not an option, cancelling/pausing subscriptions should work fine. Once you've watched everything on NF, cancel/pause that and get a HBO Max or something.
I hate advertisements. I also don’t watch my shows these days, it almost all feels like indoctrination at this point.
I pay for ESPN+ because it is a convenient way to get some live sports content I like, and the quality of the service is really strong. Other networks make it harder, enforce blackouts, have terrible players that spin my fans up – and for that I use IPTV.
Then they could make an appliance called a 'cable' box so home users can stream all these 'channels' to any device they want.
And now we are back to the 1990s.
BUT.. the networks killed it and the feature never lived much into the X1 and doesn't exist anywhere at all anymore.
Such as Apple App Store? You can search for the media you want to watch in the TV app, it shows up with how much it is, and you click to pay and then watch. I do not understand any aspect of why someone would want to go back to dealing with their not on demand monopoly cable tv provider and cable boxes.
Even if you did want that, seems easier to just sign up for YouTube tv or sling and watch via the app than deal with a cable/satellite tv company.
> I am not going to pay for a service and still be subjected to advertisements.
I have some bad news for you regarding advertisements on cable...
In my household we really only subscribe to two, maybe three streaming services all at ~$10/mo/ea. The library near us has tons of movies available for streaming with just a library card, and a decent selection of DVDs (been trying to convince them to upgrade to BDs). Each service has more content than I could bother watching in a lifetime. The few times we want to watch something outside of that we'll just rent from a streaming service or if we really care about the media buy it on BD/DVD. So, cost-wise its considerably better.
All of those services really work on just about any device you can buy. Smart TV's have them, Roku's have them, Apple TV's have them, Nvidia Shield's have them, you can watch them on Chromecast, watch them on a laptop, watch them on a tablet, watch them on a phone, whatever. Practically any streaming device you can buy anywhere from $10-200 will play all of those streaming services, so its not like I'm juggling multiple different inputs for some screen. An old Chromecast in the kitchen, a Roku in the living room, my desktop in the office, a tablet in the sitting room, my phone on the bus or train or at a picnic table on lunch break at work.
This is a far cry from having to rent specific crappy power-hungry hardware at $15+/mo for each screen, $100+/mo long term contracts for service to be locked to those boxes, and then only really be able to watch it at home. Hopefully all your recordings are set and you haven't overscheduled your dual or quad tuner cable box making you miss something. Good luck catching a series from the beginning without a time machine.
The only thing I really miss from this setup is seeing NHL games, which is now stupid expensive behind AT&T TV. I used to stomache paying for Hulu Live TV when hockey was in season, but AT&T TV wants >$100/mo to get the package to watch that. I'll just go over to a friend's place or a sports bar to scratch that itch.
Heck they probably have search across all the services you subscribe to so you don't have to remember which services have what stuff.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208083
It's much patchier elsewhere.
If this is really just about additional featured slots for Youtube TV in the Roku home screen. Apple would never cave to that. Xbox, Amazon, PlayStation, none of these companies would cave and give YouTube special treatment. Roku shouldn't either.
I had read something earlier which suggested there was also an issue with Roku selling devices with processors too underpowered for some new compression algorithm YouTube wanted to use. If this is the case, this feels more reasonable to me, and I'd be less inclined to pass judgement. At the end of the day, this would be Roku trying to save money and move the costs on to Google, which isn't equitable.
Google's going to war with Roku over something that Google doesn't care about at all (it's one minor ancillary line of business to them), but is Roku's main and only meaningful line of business.
If you want to be locked into a single vendor, you can already buy Google TV from Sony or TCL (where this vendor-lock-in is guaranteed). The whole point of Roku is that it's independent, it's not operated by any one streaming/media service, it's not a "Google TV" or an "Apple TV" or a "PlayStation TV" or whatever.
Roku has to fight this, tooth-and-nail, or all other services on the Roku platform will demand the same, and totally destroy the entire Roku product lineup.
In most other companies, everything else being equal: someone higher up would have already stepped in and said "YouTube TV isn't worth it, you need to end this, you're sullying the corporate brand." But that's not really how Google operates; at least, not yet.
Also, the competition is faltering. SlingTV lost NBC regional sports networks in April. I now must move over to Youtube TV. I think the competition gets stronger here, including Apple getting into the space with a live TV offering at some point. Amazon probably too with its sports rights.
Youtube TV is both important for Google, but also a way they can make Roku weaker. At the end of the day, I don’t think Google, Amazon or Apple really want another strong competitor in the living room. Don’t give them youtube TV.
GPM didn't get shut down, it got switched over to YTM. If you want to use that as an example for what might happen to YTTV, then it'd be YTTV getting moved over to an inferior rebrand that occupies the same space. And I don't know what you're talking about with Play Movies and TV. It's still there.
Google Play Movies and TV was shutdown earlier this year to be replaced (sort of) with YouTube TV -- the same "YouTube TV" in the article above.
https://twitter.com/liliputingnews/status/138170402082645197...
https://www.androidauthority.com/google-play-movies-shutdown...
The shutdown of Google Play Movies and TV and the stuffing of parts of that system into "YouTube TV", is sort of the original catalyst for how Roku and YouTube TV got into this fight in the first place.
I don't really buy the compression algorithm thing either - surely they make more off of ads than the savings that would be generated from better compression.
pretty sure this is just hardball over revenue sharing, data sharing, and technical requirements...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Wojcicki [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundar_Pichai
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_management
"The two companies had a December deadline for renegotiation, but sources say it hasn’t been met, and as a result, new Roku devices will continue to be unable to download YouTube or YouTube TV apps."
Edit: I did not realize that the base YouTube app was specifically mentioned in the article, alongside YTTV. That's surprising and is a bigger deal than I'd thought before.
I had the service for a while, solely for local news. They bumped the price up a few times, and it was just too expensive at $65/month.
I ended up buying a Tablo device instead. A bit of fiddling with different antennas, but it works great. There is the up-front cost of ~$250 or so for the device, decent antenna, and hard drive. Then $5/month after that, or $10/month if you want the commercial skip. I'm happy with it. You can access it from a Roku app, so the end experience for local news is pretty much the same as it was with YouTubeTV.
The only difference here is that the specifics of the contract is being waved about in public to get ahead of customer fallout to losing access to the YouTube channel.
This is why I have chosen to spend the extra money and use a Apple TV. Google still spies on my content when I am in their app, but at least apple is not using analytics and screenshots to figure out what I am watching and sell it others.
wakes up
Don't worry about it, Roku ... I use your devices around the house and if I ever need a youtube on bigscreen, I just share direct to the "smart" TV instead ...
Hey youtube, or whoever is causing this, you're just making yourselves look dumb to consumers who will either be angry at your or just bypass your dumb stance on the matter.
Edit: I remember the old days with disdain, but does anyone miss the Microsoft days? I know I know ... but at least I could force my machine to do whatever the hell I wanted. Download an .exe and get on with it ... phew, actually, I'm forgetting the bad things ... but at least it was "open" and I had control. Kind of. You know what I mean.
That is what youtube wants and not what Roku wants though. Roku gets paid when you use youtube there, if you bypass the Roku ecosystem like this to go directly to Youtube then Youtube won.