odyssey
gaming clips, one thumb at a time
a vertical, swipe-through feed for gaming clips — upload, transcode, and scroll. ran for a couple of years and is now switched off.
what it was
clip sites at the time were built like youtube: a grid of thumbnails you had to choose from. clips are short enough that choosing is the expensive part, so odyssey threw the grid away and gave you one clip at a time, full screen, swipe for the next.
how it worked
django on aws. uploads went to s3, transcoding ran out of band so the poster was not stuck waiting on a video, and the feed was a ranked queue rather than a page of results — which is the part that makes an endless scroll feel endless.
why it stopped
hosting video is expensive and a clip site is only worth anything once a lot of people are already posting to it. i did not get it there, and it was not worth paying to keep the lights on. archived rather than pretending otherwise.
built with
python · django · aws · postgresql