DIGITAL TURF WARS: Google pulls YouTube off the Amazon Echo Show.

The Echo Show, if you’re not familiar, is the Alexa-enabled smart speaker that has a screen on it so you can do stuff like… watch video. And YouTube is the internet’s largest source of said video. One of the core use cases of the Echo Show for some people might be watching cooking lessons or music videos — on YouTube.

Amazon’s strident statement makes clear that it doesn’t believe this is a technical mistake, but a conscious choice by Google. Google, however, very much begs to differ on the reason it blocked YouTube on the Echo Show:

We’ve been in negotiations with Amazon for a long time, working towards an agreement that provides great experiences for customers on both platforms. Amazon’s implementation of YouTube on the Echo Show violates our terms of service, creating a broken user experience. We hope to be able to reach an agreement and resolve these issues soon.

Reading between the lines, I’d guess Google very much wants features that it thinks are essential for YouTube’s future growth included, stuff like subscriptions, next video recommendations, autoplay, and so on. But who knows! Only the negotiators at the table.

The features Google believes are “essential for YouTube’s future growth” are the annoyances which keep my own use of the platform to a bare minimum.