Roku Tells Customers it is Unable To Strike a Deal With YouTube

Roku on Thursday told customers via a post on its corporate blog that it has still not been able to strike a distribution agreement with YouTube TV, which has been removed from Roku's channel store for five months. From a report: It's the first time Roku has directly acknowledged the issue to its customers. Roku says YouTube TV parent Google has made anti-competitive demands in distribution negotiations, which still haven't been resolved. In the blog post, Roku says Google has made anti-competitive demands in carriage agreements, including asking Roku to create a dedicated search results row for YouTube within the Roku smart TV interface and demanding certain features on Roku that they don't insist on getting from other streaming platforms. Roku reiterated that 'our concerns with Google are not about money,' but striking an agreement with fair distribution terms. 'We have not asked for a single change in the financial terms of our existing agreement,' Roku writes in the blog post. ' In fact, Roku does not earn a single dollar from YouTube's ad supported video sharing service today, whereas Google makes hundreds of millions of dollars from the YouTube app on Roku.'

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