Slipped in among the announcement for the new Alexa features coming to the Fire TV, Amazon has revealed that the YouTube app for the Fire TV will finally gain support for 4K UHD video playback. Owners of the Fire TV 2 with a 4K capable television will be able to stream YouTube’s full 4K library in all of its glory. With YouTube being among the largest providers of streaming 4K content, not being able to take advantage of that content has been a sore spot for Fire TV 2 owners ever since the device launched, but not for much longer.
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I hope it will allow playback of purchased/rental via YouTube as well. It is a peeve of mine the Apple TV, smart tv’s and bluerays usually can but the firetv can’t.
I hope the app gets a major overhaul, ever since my firetv1 updated to os5 the playback starts stuttering after a while and the only way to fix it is to force stop the app.
Do we know if its going to be an upgrade of just the app itself (as you fire it up) or will this require another firmware upgrade of the entire Fire TV?
Be nice if you could voice search Youtube too, but doesn’t sound like that’s a feature in this release.
Wow. This news made my day. I watch and upload a fair bit of 4K.
The FireTV doesn’t actually HAVE a YouTube app– it is simply a web link to
http://www.youtube.com/TV
So does this mean the FireTV is getting an actual android app, or that the website will work at 4k?
Note: I tried sideloading the androidTV YouTube app. It works, but you can’t sign-in. Rooting and sideloading google play services and the google play store doesn’t fix that either. I actually put a fair amount of effort into getting a real YouTube app on my firetv, sadly ending in failure.
It works perfectly, and better than the official app on my Roku, so why complain?
What I’m confused about is why Amazon is announcing a new feature for an unofficial app.
Because the androidTV app is much better.
What baffles me is that it is in the interest of YouTube to build a full-fledged app that works on the Fire TV … especially since they get AD revenue.
The FireTV runs Amazon’s fork of android, and while Google can’t actually _stop_ Amazon from doing that, it sure as heck isn’t going to actively support it either.
I’m not familiar. Every Youtube for TV app that I have (Amazon Fire TV, Roku, PS3/PS4) is exactly the same. The Android TV Youtube app currently has a 2.3 out of 5 rating from the Play Store.
Great news about 4k!
But what’s new in terms of sound quality of vidreos on youtube?
Could we get in a near future better sound like Dolby and DTS 5.1/7.1?
@Ulises – YouTube does not offer DD5.1. – and neither does HULU. For now I will settle for just 4K video.
I know that YouTube does not offer DD5.1, is why I’m asking and I hope that it will offer in the near future.
Although Amazon-Prime-Video and Netflix offer 5.1 for some time now, it is true that others like Hulu does not offer yet.
So, I really hope that YouTube like Netflix and Amazon, consider offering also 5.1 soon.
Giant thread here – https://productforums.google.com/forum/m/#!topic/play/Gs3fQaPdYd0
Indications are that Google Play does support DD5.1. So Google does have the infrastructure to support the same on YouTube.
Now all we need is 4K support for Kodi. I think Plex gets 4K support on FireTv.
Its about damn time. Now when?
Google has a proven track record of blabbing about a product in front of a large audience and then not following through for months, when it drops a bunch of buggy crap, which after a year it stops supporting, gives up and goes in another direction.
As usual, we have no idea when, if ever, we’ll see this app.