I don't know Sean or anything about Streamus as a business, but I use it on a regular basis and it's a really well thought out Chrome extension.

It would be great to see support for easier sharing of user-created playlists (beyond copying/pasting URLs), such as an official & searchable repository with ranked lists of playlists for different genres and purposes (reading, coding, etc.).

:) It really would be nice. It's been on my mind and I've been gradually taking steps to evolve the website into something usable for that purpose, but, for now, I have a firm priority list of things which need to get done that users don't care much about. YouTube TOS concerns (nothing huge, I've worked through them with YouTube I just need to finish writing the code), some security/oauth concerns, and getting SoundCloud added as an additional catalog source. Once those things are done I'd expect a lot of the 'smaller' features to get implemented very quickly.

You can see a full list of feature requests here: https://github.com/MeoMix/StreamusChromeExtension/issues. I haven't embellished on all of the ideas yet, but the list should give you a general idea of what I think needs to happen -- including improving the UX of sharing playlists.

Very interesting extension. Doesn't the YouTube ToS prohibit playing just audio from a video? (#8 and #9 under Prohibitions are where I got this impression: https://developers.google.com/youtube/terms)

Indeed. Thus the talks with YouTube. The issue has always been more of a technical challenge than a political/design challenge. The foreground popup page used by most extensions is destroyed when focus is lost which makes it a very poor location for hosting YouTube's <iframe>. The audio would stop whenever the popup loses focus. So, the <iframe> is hosted on a background page which, unfortunately, isn't visible to the end user.

I've known about the issue since day 1 and went into this project with the mindset of, "If I make something cool enough to get shut down then I'll consider it a success."

A few years into the project I garnered their attention and was finally able to setup some talks to figure out what my options were for fulfilling their ToS.

My initial suggestion was to allow Streamus to follow in the footsteps of the Google Hangouts extension which uses Chrome Panels to display a tab-independent window over your browser. The intent was that the YouTube video could be displayed there and minimized when not wanted. However, this functionality is being deprecated and Google didn't have much interest in expanding the usage of it.

So, what I've got going now is some code which injects itself into YouTube's iframe and sniffs the responses from YouTube's server, https://github.com/MeoMix/StreamusChromeExtension/blob/Devel.... This allows me to pass around a pointer to the array buffer of video data being rendered in YouTube's iframe. Using this data I'm able to sync and re-render the video inside of the popup without having it coupled directly to the audio.

So far this seems like a satisfactory response to the issue. It's akin to having a YouTube video player running on an inactive tab. The user has the ability to watch the video, but isn't necessarily viewing it while listening to the audio.

I'm aware that I'm playing with fire a fair bit, but I think that's the case when using any API. YouTube has been nothing but completely understanding throughout all of our talks.

Fallback options include migrating Streamus to a Chrome App, which would not suffer the same issue but, IMO, has worse UX, or migrating away from YouTube in favor of other sources such as SoundCloud, MixCloud, SFX.io, etc.

Don't you think it's a bit risky to be building your startup on someone elses platform ?.

They might be ok with it now, but there’s nothing stopping them from changing their mind in the future.

Totally.

However, it's worth noting that there are much larger fish in this pond already! http://plug.dj/ employs 9 people and has 2.5 million in funding while being entirely dependent on YouTube's API for their business model.

I don't think that validates my decision, but it helps me sleep at night a bit. Plus, YouTube is trying to get into this sphere with software such as YouTube Music Key. They're failing to win over the general public with it, but Streamus doesn't seem to have any trouble convincing people to give YouTube a try as a more genuine music player. I'd like to think that they'd be more interested in acquiring the software than forcing it to sink alongside their own.