“Did you buy a smart TV or set-top box or tablet any time before January 2013? Do you watch YouTube on it, perhaps through an app? Bad news: Google has shut down the feed that pushed content into the app,” Charles Arthur reports for The Guardian. “One person contacted me on Twitter to complain their daughter now couldn’t watch an ad-free YouTube video on his first-generation iPad (that’s 2010) via the YouTube app. Millions of people will be having the same experience. It’s not only iPads; pricey Sony, Samsung and Panasonic ‘smart’ TVs (with built-in app capabilities) were sold by the truckload, and the idea was that they would be the future. ”
“Google explains that this disconnect is because the API – the software interface – for remote access to YouTube has been updated from version 2 to version 3 (v1 was buried back in 2009; v2 surfaced in August),” Arthur reports. “V3, launched in December 2012, offers more capability – though nothing that really matters to someone watching on an iPad or smart TV.”
“There’s now a new dimension to obsolescence. We usually fret about the hardware in our ‘smart’ devices becoming superannuated as the ever-increasing demands of the web or whatever the internet throws up next will leave fixed processor power wheezing,” Arthur reports. “Now we have to worry too about software spigots being turned off.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Note: Select devices manufactured in 2012 and earlier are affected, including:
• iOS 5 and earlier devices
• Apple TV (1st and 2nd gen)
• Sony TVs & Blu-ray Discs
• Panasonic TVs & Blu-ray Discs
• Sony Playstation Vita
• Older set-top boxes (ex, DirectTV)Users of affected devices using iOS 5 and earlier can visit m.youtube.com in their mobile browser to access YouTube.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “James” for the heads up.]
AppleTV. Maybe Wii, Xbox 360. What else gets the ax.
Come on Apple, where Apple TV 4?
You can solve the problem by getting the new YouTube iOS app and AirPlay it to your old Apple TV.
Not unlike when Apple shut of the Facetime spigot for my Retina iPad with Lightning connector because I was still using iOS6. There was no reason other than Apple FORCING people onto the newest iOS so that Timmy can act like we all went willingly and with much desire. Well, some of us had reasons not to update.
So why can’t Apple instal a new YouTube app on my Apple TV version 2. F***ing outrageous.
Probably because Google hasn’t provided them a compiled version of the you tube app that runs on Apple TV 1 and 2. This is not Apple’s fault, it is Google’s fault. They simply decided not to support older hardware.
Google giveth, Google taketh away. Nothing new here. Don’t trusteth Google.
Apple giveth, Apple taketh away the same way.
Why do you continue to place endless trust in Apple? A lot of stuff that Apple axes is not replaced by something better.
Yes, but Googles cycle time is faster and with far less regard for those who adopted their nifty data harvesting devices.
I wish I could go back two versions of YouTube for Apple TV.
The only nice feature about the new version is the continuos play. But I really miss the recommendations according to what you just saw, the history (there is a history cleaning but I don’t know what it cleans since there is no way to access the history of what I watch.
Welcome to “upgrade world”
I have a whole series of Apple computers from the cube onwards that are in perfect working order and are hardly able to access the WWW just because the software has been end-dated. Nothing new here.
There are plenty of websites – the BBC for one, whose early apps no longer work and for which direct access via the main website is flakey to say the least.
Its not like cookers, fridges or even TV’s that run for 15 years or more – it’s 5yrs max and then you are forced to buy again.
This is exhibit A in “Why I will never buy a ‘smart’ TV”. I knew sh*t like this was going to happen.
When I buy a TV, I expect it to last 10 years. I don’t want to find myself in the position of having to replace a perfectly good television just because the software in it is no longer supported.
I will stick with cheap set-top boxes that I can swap out every few years.
——RM