Streamus

» see streamus.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

By 2014 YouTube was the music library. Not a music service, a library: the place where the song you wanted actually existed, uploaded by a stranger over a still image, usually in worse quality than the CD and always available. This was true in Ankara the same way it was true everywhere, and it stayed true through the spring of that year even while the site itself was blocked here, from 27 March until a court ordered it back in June. The habit survived the block. Everyone just worked around it.

The gap between YouTube being the library and YouTube being a music player was obvious and nobody at Google was in a hurry to close it. You could not queue things properly. You could not minimize the window without the audio stopping. Sean Anderson, twenty-five and working alone in California, shipped a Chrome extension on 11 February 2014 that fixed exactly this: a real queue you could search into, and playback that kept going while you did something else. He called it Streamus and gave it away under the Apache license.

A TechCrunch post took it to seventy thousand users almost immediately. It passed three hundred thousand. It also, from the first week, had a cease-and-desist letter from YouTube sitting in the developer's inbox.

~ the dossier ~

~ nine hours ~

The objection was specific and, read coldly, correct. YouTube's API terms do not let you separate the audio of a video from its visuals and present them apart, and separating them was the entire product. Streamus did not keep the video in the foreground and it did not show the advertisements. Anderson spent more than a year trying to find a version of his own extension that satisfied both the rules and the reason anyone had installed it.

The timeline he published is a study in how these negotiations actually go. An initial contact, then four months of silence from the head of developer relations. A meeting with the YouTube Music team under NDA, then four more months of nothing. YouTube reappeared on 17 June 2015. On 30 June it told him to strip the audio-only capability entirely, with nine hours of notice before the deadline. He shipped an update on 1 July that forced the video to stay visible, and on 7 July that was rejected too, because a user could still minimize the window by hand. The final date for compliance before the API key went away was 17 July.

He did not wait for it. On 13 July 2015 he announced the extension would come off the Chrome Web Store the next day, and it did. Then he published the whole email chain inside the app so its users could read what had happened to it. Google's only public comment was a sentence encouraging developers to embed YouTube videos "in creative and innovative ways that comply with our terms."

~ the repo nobody closed ~

StreamusChromeExtension is still on GitHub, created 15 September 2013, Apache 2.0, a thousand and sixty-nine stars and two hundred and ten forks. It is not archived. There are eighty-one open issues on it. The last substantive commit by Anderson is dated 16 December 2015, five months after the takedown, and the final change of any kind is somebody fixing a broken link to the Mocha docs in January 2017.

streamus.com does not resolve. What is left is a public repository that any one of those two hundred and ten forks can still build and side-load, running against an API key that will never be issued again. YouTube Music launched that November.

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