If You Buy A New Roku, You Won't Be Able To Install YouTube!

If you’re planning to buy a new Roku device this holiday season, you’re in for a nasty surprise. That is, not being able to install YouTube on your shiny new Roku streaming device.

This stems from Google and Roku’s dispute for carriage of YouTube TV, and now is affecting all YouTube products. The two had a December deadline for a renegotiation, but many sources have said that a deal has not been met. And because of that, new Roku devices will be unable to download YouTube and YouTube TV apps on those devices.

Google said in a statement that “since we haven’t been able to continue our conversations in good faith, our partnership for all new Roku devices will unfortunately end on December 9. 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.”

Roku believes Google’s demands are anti-competitive

This whole spat is reportedly about Google demanding some anti-competitive things in their new carriage agreement. Roku has said multiple times that it is not seeking more financial compensation for YouTube. In fact, it does not even make any money off of YouTube.

But, we have heard that Google’s demands are pretty anti-competitive. Wanting Roku to create a dedicated search results row for YouTube within the Roku smart TV interface. Also insisting certain features on Roku that they don’t insist on getting from other streaming platforms.

Roku standing up to Google is pretty admirable here. Since a big number of its customers likely use YouTube and/or YouTube TV on their Roku devices. So this could end up hurting Roku, and forcing it to lose customers. Which could also help Google, as they are more likely to switch over to Android TV over Fire TV, from Roku.