Since July of 2008, the Terms of Service for YouTube have restricted implementations of the technology on TVs utilizing the APIs. The means of gaining YouTube access, such as video scraping technology, weren"t approved, and now the company will begin fully restricting those who can access it, starting on December 2.
The December 2 deadline was said to have first shown up here, on the blog of the COO of Popcorn Hour. The message stated, "As of Wednesday, December 2, 2009, YouTube will no longer be available to Popcorn Hour users," and warned users that this was no technical issue. Gizmodo posted a couple statements from the company itself, stating, "Since July of 2008, YouTube"s Terms of Service has restricted implementations for televisions based on our APIs. YouTube has been in active discussions with various developers on how best to implement YouTube on set top boxes and TVs. There are several companies, however, that have deployed solutions, like video scraping technology, to circumvent the rules and violate YouTube"s Terms of Service. Companies that have negotiated agreements to use our APIs, like TiVo, Sony, Panasonic and Sony"s PS3 are not impacted."
Whilst the more popular devices mentioned above will be unaffected by this decision, it means that the lower key, though still popular, applications will now have to miss out. Though the decision may be rather unappealing to some, you can hardly blame YouTube; those they"re soon to be blocking have been breaking the Terms of Service, so they were already doing wrong from the beginning.