YouTube Kills Popular Audio Streaming Chrome Extension Streamus

There is some bad news for those who use YouTube to listen to music using browser extensions. YouTube has decided to axe Streamus, a massively popular Chrome extension that allowed users to listen to the audio version of their favourite YouTube clips, apart from creating and sharing playlists.

While the move has come as a surprise to many, it turns out YouTube and Streamus had been struggling to work out an arrangement for months. YouTube wasn't pleased with Streamus' non-compliance with its terms of service (ToS).

But first, a word about Streamus. Formerly available as a Chrome extension, Streamus had been installed over 300,000 times in the three years of its existence.

In hindsight, Streamus became popular because it fixed one of YouTube's biggest problem: an audio client - or its lack thereof to be more precise. Streamus allowed users to build up a playlist of YouTube videos and then played audio versions of it.

When you think about it, the reasons for Streamus being popular were simple: there aren't too many streaming services out there that offer a web-client. Secondly, not many of them host such a large library of media content.

But as it has been the case with so many YouTube clients - including everyone's favourite YouTube app for Windows Phone - the company wasn't happy with the way others used its service.

In case of Streamus, the service didn't "back-link" to its corresponding YouTube title -- did not show the associated video, and it also didn't show any ads - three factors that broke compliance with YouTube's ToS. Streamus is no longer available on the Chrome Web Store, and its API key has been revoked.

The Next Web reports about email communication between Sean Anderson, founder of Streamus, and YouTube, showing the developer eager to make his extension compliant with YouTube's ToS, and a long back-and-forth between the two.

The email thread shows the two had tried to find a way to let Streamus exist and work in conjunction with YouTube, but failed repeatedly. The mail chain also shows the initiation of a hiring process for Anderson at YouTube, one that Anderson says he abandoned since it appeared that Google was trying to "solve a problem" with the move.