Options if YouTube vanishes from your Amazon gizmos

Attention Fire TV owners: YouTube might soon disappear from your Amazon streaming device. But you’ll still have options.

Google is threatening to pull YouTube from Fire TV by Jan. 1, the latest round in a fierce battle between the two tech heavyweights. If that happens, Fire TV owners can still watch on a phone, tablet or personal computer. That includes an Amazon Fire tablet, as Google hasn’t threatened to block that yet.

For those willing to abandon Fire TV, just about any other device will play YouTube. Not all of them will play video from Amazon, although Apple TV just got Amazon’s app Wednesday.

Here are some reasons you might want to stick with Fire TV — and some you might not.

The case for Fire TV

YouTube was never the centerpiece of Fire TV to begin with. It’s not even a full-fledged app on Fire TV — just a link to a YouTube website designed for mobile devices.

Fire TV itself is best seen as a companion to Amazon’s $99-a-year Prime loyalty program. Although Amazon has gotten better about promoting rival services, video available through Prime remains prominent.

The device has Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant built-in. In addition to weather, sports scores and stock quotes, it offers playback controls for some selected apps. That lets you ask Alexa to forward 30 seconds, for instance.

Amazon’s $40 Fire TV Stick is good for regular, high-definition TV sets. If you have a higher-resolution 4K TV, you’ll want the regular Fire TV for $70. There isn’t a lot of 4K video yet, but the price difference is small compared with what 4K TVs cost.

The regular Fire TV also offers high-dynamic range, which has better contrast and produces brighter whites and darker blacks. Again, HDR video is slowly coming.

On the downside, Fire TV doesn’t offer iTunes or Google Play video — and YouTube may soon join the list. Fire TV’s remote also lacks volume controls, something that’s becoming standard on streaming devices.

Google’s alternative

The current feud centers on Amazon’s refusal to sell some Google devices that compete with Amazon products. That includes Google’s Chromecast, a streaming device that’s cheap but slightly tricky to use, since you have to start video on your iPhone or Android phone and then switch the stream to the TV.

Plenty of video services work with Chromecast — but Amazon doesn’t let its video service work with the Google device.

Google offers other manufacturers its own software for streaming

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