Skip to main content

YouTube creates one-of-a-kind Grammys invitations with Google Home Maxes

YouTube celebrates Music's Biggest Night - BTS
The 2018 Grammy Awards are less than a week away, and YouTube has created something special in honor of the biggest night in music. To commemorate the ceremony, held this year in New York, the Google-owned music and video platform has joined forces with native New Yorker and hip hop legend NAS to throw what is sure to be one of the biggest parties of the year. But the real news isn’t the party itself — it’s the invitation. The calling card for the upcoming party is a custom Google Home Max made even more unique by the work of New York graffiti artist CYCLE.

Meant to celebrate the rise of rap and hip hop over the last several decades (and the fact that the majority of nominees for both Album of the Year and Record of the Year this season are rappers), YouTube’s enormous art project celebrates “the rebellious and riotous spirit of those early days of Hip Hop, where kids with a mic or a spraycan were just looking for a way to express themselves.” As such, YouTube provided CYCLE with 400 Google Home Maxes from its parent company, creating a 55-foot wall of boxes as a canvas. The resulting mural promises to be “a gorgeous throwback to the past, realized on a backdrop straight from the future.” 

The Google Home Max, released in December 2017, is a seriously enormous speaker, and is meant to rival Apple’s upcoming HomePod, but with Google Assistant integration rather than Siri. In our review, we called it “eye-catching thanks to its size,” and with great sound to boot. That said, given its $400 price tag, it’s not quite as accessible as some of Google’s other smart speakers, like the Google Home or Google Home Mini. But with YouTube using these speakers in their Grammys invitation, demand for the speaker just might kick into high gear.

“We’ve hand delivered these collectible invites to some of the biggest names in Hip Hop, and once our guests unbox, all they have to do is ask the Google Assistant for the details,” YouTube explained of its creative and high tech invitations. If you’re a lucky recipient of one of these Google Home Maxes (you probably won’t be, unless you’re a music industry heavyweight), you can just say, “Hey Google, take me to the YouTube party.”

But don’t worry — even if you don’t receive an invite, you’ll be able to use your own Google Home or Assistant to answer or ask about Grammys’ trivia.

Editors' Recommendations

Lulu Chang
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Fascinated by the effects of technology on human interaction, Lulu believes that if her parents can use your new app…
Why you may still be missing ESPN and other Disney-owned channels on YouTube TV
YouTube TV on Roku.

ESPN, ABC, FX, and other channels owned by Disney have returned to YouTube TV. But if you reorder your live listings so that the channels you actually watch are higher up than the ones you don't, you likely don't see those channels at all.

The problem is a bit of a glitch in that not only have the channels in question been pushed to the bottom of the listings in the custom view -- they're actually not even enabled in the first place. And that's not a new phenomenon. It's the way it has always worked when new channels are added to YouTube TV and you're using the custom sort, and so it makes sense (in a perverse, broken sort of way) that it's the case with the Disney-owned channels as they've been added back to YouTube TV.

Read more
YouTube TV couldn’t have picked a worse time to lose ESPN
best youtube tv alternatives alternative 5

There's never a good time for a streaming service to lose channels. Not for you, not for the service. But YouTube TV's potential loss of the Disney-owned channels -- which, among other things, comprises ABC, FX, ESPN, and of course, Disney -- could be devastating for what is believed to be the second-largest live TV streaming service in the United States, with more than 3 million subscribers at one point.

The linchpin in this sort of thing tends to be sports -- live events whose distribution rights command top dollar. The NFL may be what you think of first when it comes to the sort of thing, with any one of the usual suspects supposedly in the running to carry NFL Sunday Ticket, which lets anyone watch out-of-market games.

Read more
Google and Roku strike a deal to keep YouTube and YouTube TV on the platform
YouTube on Roku.

Google and Roku today announced that the two companies have reached a deal that will keep YouTube and YouTube TV on the No. 1 streaming platform in the United States and return the YouTube TV channel to the Roku Channel Store. Terms of the deal weren't disclosed, but it's good for multiple years.

Roku's Dallas Lawrence, head of comms for platform business, told Digital Trends via email: "Roku and Google have agreed to a multiyear extension for both YouTube and YouTube TV.  This agreement represents a positive development for our shared customers, making both YouTube and YouTube TV available for all streamers on the Roku platform."

Read more