Our long national nightmare is over. The Amazon Echo Show — Amazon's $229 Alexa-powered Echo with a touchscreen — can watch dog videos on YouTube once more. Or cat videos. Any videos, actually, on YouTube.
The return (as spotted by VoiceBot and TechCrunch) comes a couple months after YouTube unceremoniously disappeared from the Echo Show, presumably because the native experience bypassed in-video ads. Now you once more can ask Alexa to play something on YouTube.
The result isn't nearly as immersive, though. Search results don't look as nice as they one did, and they're powered by Microsoft's Bing search engine. (That should pretty much tell you all you need to know about how talks went with Google, right?) Choose a video and you're taken into a rudimentary browser window. You'll have to enter a full-screen mode on your own, and you're greeted by all the display ads — in addition to in-video advertising — that you'd expect from this sort of view.
https://twitter.com/mdrndad/status/933029073168883713
That's at best a weak compromise, but it's still better than nothing. The real question is how it'll stand up against Google's rumored "Quartz" device — a Google Home with a screen.
