As you might imagine Google is not happy about this and have sent over a nasty letter telling Microsoft to pull the app… Or Else. Exactly that that or else is no one seems to know and Google did not say. Unfortunately for Microsoft Google could make good on their threat and lock the YouTube app out of the playground. Windows Phone 8 users could find themselves cut off from their favorite videos without warning.

For their part Google does have some ground to stand on as they have never allowed you to download their video content. Doing so violates their agreement with the people that post content. It is one of the reasons that they ask you to establish the originality of the content you publish. The problem is that we are guessing that they are more annoyed about the ability to block their ads. Simply put Google is not a “search” company so much as an advertising company. They use their search capability to facilities their advertising. If Microsoft had just put in the ability to download the videos and not touched the ad revenue we wonder if Google would have said anything.

Microsoft claims that the changes were due to Google not sharing the right API with them and preventing YouTube from working properly on Windows Phone. While this might be true we doubt that even with an older API Microsoft did not have to add in the new “Features” you can get a hint of this by their comment that the new App has been received well by users. Google maintains that they can still access YouTube through their mobile browser so they do not feel that Microsoft had to go in this direction.

This could end up getting ugly although all of the indications are that Microsoft and Google will work this out in the end. We are sure that part of the agreement will be for Microsoft to dial back their ads targeting Google and their services and then all will be well in the YouTube world. There is no way that Google would want to risk alienating even the small percentage of the market that Windows Phone represents and Microsoft does not want to find themselves locked out of the party either. This makes this whole event entertaining to watch, but not of much real importance… even on a slow news day.

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