
Streamus updated to be compliant with YouTube terms of service - captn3m0
https://github.com/MeoMix/StreamusChromeExtension/releases/tag/v0.177
======
forgotpasswd3x
When I opened Streamus today, I received this message:

Hey everyone, Sean here.

So, good news for people who love bad news.

I've been working with YouTube on-and-off since November of last year
regarding their Terms of Service. The past four months have involved a lot of
talks with them.

Prior to July 7 I was led to believe that Streamus would be fully compliant
with YouTube's demands once it supported showing video. I spent hundreds of
hours making this a reality.

Unfortunately, after adding this functionality, I was informed that showing
video was not sufficient. YouTube has demanded that Streamus pause music when
minimized. Failure to do so will result in Streamus being removed from the
Chrome Web Store on July 14.

So, for now, this is the end of the road. :(

This update provides you with the ability to export your playlists back to
YouTube. Right-click on a playlist through the left-side menu, or click the
'More actions' button, to see the option. Doing so will create a new playlist
on your YouTube account and move all available songs to it. The code isn't
very smart. It won't be able to update an existing playlist, but at least you
can get your songs out.

As for me? I will begin working on SoundCloud support effective immediately.
Streamus will be unpublished from the Chrome Web Store while I work on this.

If you have any questions, comments, or concerns feel free to e-mail me at
admin@streamus.com or you can find me on the r/streamus subreddit:
[http://www.reddit.com/r/streamus](http://www.reddit.com/r/streamus)

I'm truly sorry. I had the utmost confidence that adding support for video
would fulfill YouTube's demands and was heartbroken when I learned this would
not be the case. You can view the full conversation I've had with YouTube
here: [http://i.imgur.com/15gaOf6.png](http://i.imgur.com/15gaOf6.png). I
fought long and hard for you all and this was not a decision I took lightly.

I look forward to listening to music with you all once again in the future.

~~~
themgt
Last commit "Hiding video for final update since it didnt help"
[https://github.com/MeoMix/StreamusChromeExtension/commit/ba6...](https://github.com/MeoMix/StreamusChromeExtension/commit/ba6354705176f927e8091a3aa58e88e1a2e11534)

Wouldn't it be possible to have most of this functionality in a client-side
web app, and then Google could do nothing to shut it down?

------
infinitesoup
It's unfortunate for Streamus, but expected and reasonable in my opinion
(especially since the developer knew he was breaking the ToS from the
beginning).

YouTube presumably has negotiated contracts with the content owners which
allow them to stream audiovisual content under a certain set of constraints.
Many content owners distribute their content in other ways (e.g., selling
music on the iTunes store), so they allow their content for "free" on YouTube
only because they know that the audio component will be accompanied by a video
of their choice and they will be supported by ads. These content owners
wouldn't want YouTube to be used just like an ordinary music streaming service
without being compensated properly. In order to hold up their end of the deal,
YouTube has to enforce their terms of service, otherwise they risk losing the
contracts that they have already negotiated.

If Streamus wanted to keep doing things like they were before these changes,
then they would have to go and negotiate contracts with the content owners,
just like YouTube had to do. Streamus has to abide by the ToS (which is in
turn the terms of the negotiated contracts) if they expect to use the YouTube
API.

------
jimmydddd
Sean:

I've been a fan of Streamus from early on. Thanks.

YT's policy seems to be "No Audio without Video, unless the Audio is from YT
running in another browser tab, then it is OK."

That being said, there's a Chrome App that lets you run YT in a separate,
hidden tab (so you can't accidentally close the tab, for example).

Maybe you could open a hidden YT tab in parallel to Streamus, and you would be
meeting their requirements? Or maybe you could start with a version that opens
a visible parallel tab, and then later add an option to make it hidden?

Of course, this implementation might use double the bandwidth. Maybe you could
play the audio through Streamus, and the video in the tab?

Good luck.

------
captn3m0
The conversation thread with youtube is also interesting:
[https://t.co/CNZQIz78hU](https://t.co/CNZQIz78hU).

~~~
Touche
Thanks for posting this. While I can empathize with the work he put in, I
can't imagine that he thought this would turn out any other way. He has an app
that allows users to play music for free, he thought he could find a loophole
that would be allowed?

~~~
agumonkey
I wonder what's gonna happen, will they let his code behave like an embedded
youtube player or will they backpressure on every other websites at the risk
of annoying a big chunk of the web ?

~~~
Touche
Sounds like websites with embedded YouTube players will continue to work as
they do today.

------
ptgamr
It's always a pain working with legal stuffs & guys. YouTube make two valid
points:

\- Streamus has to display video

\- Streamus has to display ads

And Sean's doing his very best job to display the video. Ads will be fixed by
YouTube team. So far so good...

However, the final one is not reasonable at all: "stop playing after hiding
the extension". How could that be different with another tab open and playing
YouTube video on YouTube website? If this is a requirement in the deal with
labels, even YouTube.com is not compliant with its TOS :-)

I got the same pain while developing UpNext[formally SoundCloudify]. Basically
like Streamus, but has SoundCloud support.
[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/upnext-music-
playe...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/upnext-music-
player/dgkfcdlmdppfhbfmooinbcejdaplobpk)

Don't make it viral, otherwise, it'll be the same fate as Streamus :(

------
glomph
Honestly reading the conversation I think Youtube made it pretty obvious what
they were going to require. The dev seems to be willfully ignorant in his
replies.

------
azeirah
It's been weird following streamus for a while, I don't use Chrome so I've
never really used it. It's sad to see a project backed by such a dedicated
developer go down like this.

------
userbinator
It's open-source so you can still change it to do what you want, right?

Incidentally, I've also been using YouTube as a sort of internet-radio
recently, with just a simple shell script that searches for videos matching
specific keywords and plays them in a pseudo-random order via youtube-dl.
Works well enough, although I do get the occasional non-music coming through.

~~~
mschuster91
Yeah but Google Chrome all but bans extensions outside of the Chrome extension
store.

~~~
userbinator
Developer Mode is still a way around that, but some of the comments made here
are rather prescient:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7237725](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7237725)

(Search for "YouTube".)

~~~
Dylan16807
Prescient? They've had the nonsense youtube rules for a long time.

------
fidz
> Streamus always loaded the video and it is now simply being presented to you

I really didn't know this. I thought Streamus only download the audio stream
(since most youtube downloader able to retrieve audio stream without the
video)

------
EGreg
I once built [http://youmixer.com](http://youmixer.com), before FB broke the
login and I never bothered to fix it.

Try creating a mix without signing in.

Does YouTube now ban that?

------
lamosty
Do you know of any high-quality alternatives?

~~~
JoshTriplett
Use youtube-dl to download from YouTube (and many other sites). youtube-dl
downloads the full video/audio file by default (which these days involves
downloading and muxing audio and video streams), but it can also just download
the audio.

