Retired · 2021
Odyssey — Gaming clips, one thumb at a time
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.
- Python
- Django
- AWS
- PostgreSQL
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.