Just two days after
Microsoft relaunched its YouTube app for Windows Phone smartphones and thanked
Google for its “support”,
Google has once again blocked the app from working.
The app had originally been removed from the Windows Phone store in May after Google complained to
Microsoft about its ability to download videos to the device, as well as preventing video advertisements from playing.
Mobile is increasingly important to YouTube, accounting for more than 25% of its global watch time, and more than 1bn views a day.
In June, Wedge Partners analyst Martin Pyykkonen estimated that video ads shown on mobile devices could be generating as much as $350m of revenues per quarter for YouTube.
It relaunched this week, but now Google has blocked it again. “Microsoft has not made the browser upgrades necessary to enable a fully-featured YouTube experience, and has instead re-released a YouTube app that violates our Terms of Service,” a spokesperson tells The Verge.
Those prospects seem somewhat less hopeful now. Microsoft later published a longer blog post by its vice president and deputy general counsel, David Howard, explaining exactly why the app has been blocked again.
According to Howard, Microsoft bowed to Google’s wishes by re-enabling ads, removing the ability for users to download videos, and also stopping them from watching “reserved” videos on YouTube.
Microsoft went ahead and re-published its non-HTML5 YouTube app for Windows Phone while “committing to work with Google long-term on an app based on HTML5″, but Howard says Google decided to block the short-term app nonetheless.
Howard’s blog post concludes with a request for Google to stop blocking the app, although there are more menacing hints elsewhere in the post when he refers to antitrust investigations against Google (“some of which are still ongoing”) where the company “has reiterated its commitment to openness and its ability to stick to its openness commitments voluntarily”.
YouTube used to be preloaded in
Apple’s
iOS software for iPhones and iPads, but was removed from
iOS 6 and onwards due to Google and
Apple’s licensing deal not being renewed. Google later launched a standalone version of the app through Apple’s App Store.
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