BeatTube

» see beattube.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

BeatTube reached the Japanese App Store on 1 May 2014 with a premise you could explain in one line. Point a rhythm game at YouTube. You picked a video and built the note chart against it by hand. Other people then played your chart and ranked themselves on it. The catalog was whatever happened to be on YouTube that week.

It ran on advertising with a paid tier above it, BeatTube Premium, plus an unlimited play ticket for anyone who wanted to keep playing past the limit. On 2 January 2015 the developer posted that registrations had passed one million, eight months after release. For an iOS-only app made by a very small Japanese studio, that is a number worth putting on a news page.

I did not play it, and the reason is built into what it was. A chart library is a local object: the videos people pick are the ones already on their own screens, and in 2014 the ones on mine were not these. The app never needed a Turkish release to exclude me. The song list did that on its own.

On 10 October 2019 the developer posted a closure notice that is unusually willing to explain itself, and set the end for 30 December at 14:00.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the charts people made ~

The work in BeatTube was authored by its players. Nothing generated a chart for you: somebody sat with a video and placed the notes, and the ranking attached to that chart rather than to the song. Years of other people's listening, timed out by hand, made a strange and specific kind of archive.

The developer understood which half of that archive it actually owned. The closure post promised that charts players had written would be exportable as text by around spring 2020. The videos were never theirs to hand back. The charts were.

~ what youtube said ~

The October notice gives two causes and does not rank them as excuses. The first is age: nearly seven years from the start of development, with a portrait and landscape layout that the developer says made every adaptation to a changing environment harder. The second is the one that ended it. Video search had broken inside the chart editor, and after talking to YouTube the developer was told 「公式サービスと同様の機能を持つサービスは認めない」, that a service with the same functions as the official one would not be permitted. The post adds that this appeared to be happening to a lot of services lately.

Read plainly, the objection was to a shape rather than to this game: any service that searched the whole catalog and played back what it found, which is the one thing BeatTube had to do to exist. The developer wrote that keeping only a subset of videos was technically possible and that losing 「好きな動画で譜面作成」, making charts from the video you like, left nothing worth operating. The final post went up on 30 December confirming the 14:00 stop, and said the app would be gone from the store inside a day. An iTunes lookup on its ID returns zero results today.

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