[drusepth]

If I recall correctly, Google changed the Chromecast protocols repeatedly to disable the Fire stick's implementation because the Fire was wrapping direct video links (e.g. removing all the official YouTube UI/features) and stripping ad plays.

[kuschku]

The protocol only transmits links to an html page that will be used as a player interface (and can load ads, etc) and a direct video link.

That player interface page was very device specific (e.g. the current youtube page doesn't even work on Gen1 chromecasts with 50-60Hz videos), so Amazon couldn't use those, and only supported the direct links.

Which is not that unusual — youtube could just serve a dash manifest link that directly concatenates ad and video, or build their player page better.

Google actually did it to lock people in to their Chromecast implementation (a lot of third party implementations showed up in the early days), especially for fear of DRM being broken.

We could have had an entire open ecosystem with a single standard replacing mpd, sonos etc working with everything, were it not for those actions Google took (so as a consumer and open source dev, I'm naturally pissed).