Why pay for background when you can listen for free
YouTube restricts background playback to sell Premium subscriptions. But if all you want is to listen — lectures, podcasts, interviews, music — the video track is optional. PodStream extracts the audio from a video and delivers it as a standard podcast feed.
Any podcast app understands that feed, and those apps are designed to play in the background and with the screen off. As a result you get the main benefit of Premium — background listening — without a paid subscription.
What Premium gives you vs what PodStream gives you
YouTube Premium is a bundle: background play, ad removal across all videos, in-app downloads and YouTube Music. If you watch a lot of video and want ads gone everywhere, Premium covers that for a monthly fee.
PodStream solves a single task, but for free and without locking you into an ecosystem: it turns a specific video into audio that is convenient to listen to in the background in your favorite player. Perfect when the content matters more than the picture.
How to start listening in the background
Copy a link to a video from YouTube, Rutube or VK Video and paste it into the field above. In a short while you will get a personal RSS link and a QR code.
Open the link in Apple Podcasts, Pocket Casts or another app — and listen with the screen locked. Nothing extra to install.