You might recall that Google And Roku got into a fight over the YouTube TV App on the Roku platform due to what Roku calls Google’s “predatory” and “monopoly” behavior: That led to the YouTube TV App being yanked from Roku’s app store. Google then added the YouTube TV app to the main YouTube app to get around this. But this is about to get real. Axios reports that if this goes on until December 9th, the YouTube app will disappear from the Roku App store as that’s when their current deal expires. If you have it installed, it will remain. But if you delete it, or if you didn’t have it in the first place, you won’t be able get it. Thus users lose as is usually the case where two companies get into a fight like this.
Roku lays out the reasons why they’re taking on Google here. But it seems really odd to me why this fight is going on in the first place. Roku by far is the dominant player in the streaming hardware space. Thus logic would suggest that Google would have a lot to lose by being on the wrong side of this. But I guess we’ll see who blinks first. If either party blinks at all.