Streamus updated to be compliant with YouTube terms of service

https://github.com/MeoMix/StreamusChromeExtension/releases/tag/v0.177

by captn3m0 • 11 years ago

48 21 11 years ago

captn3m0• 11 years ago

The conversation thread with youtube is also interesting: https://t.co/CNZQIz78hU.

Touche2• 11 years ago

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• 11 years ago

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 ?

forgotpasswd3x• 11 years ago

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 Streamus will be unpublished from the Chrome Web Store while I work on this.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

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. 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• 11 years ago

Last commit "Hiding video for final update since it didnt help" https://github.com/MeoMix/StreamusChromeExtension/commit/ba6...

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?

BenGoldberg• 11 years ago

Themgt, it's obviously a matter of legality, not practicality.

Chrome's rules are that no plugins in their store may do illegal things, so if Youtube says that Streamus isn't compliant, then Streamus can't be in the Chrome Web Store.

That doesn't prevent us who already have the plugin from continuing to use it, it's merely a violation of youtube's license agreement to do so.

userbinator2• 11 years ago

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• 11 years ago

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

userbinator2• 11 years ago

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

(Search for "YouTube".)

dublinben• 11 years ago

Use Firefox then.

lamosty• 11 years ago

Do you know of any high-quality alternatives?

JoshTriplett• 11 years ago

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.

jimmydddd• 11 years ago

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.

azeirah• 11 years ago

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.

EGreg• 11 years ago

I once built 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?

glomph• 11 years ago

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.

infinitesoup• 11 years ago

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.

fidz• 11 years ago

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)

ptgamr• 11 years ago

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...

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

Streamus updated to be compliant with YouTube terms of service

Related Stories