Oddshot

» see oddshot.tv as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Oddshot did one thing. While a stream was running, you hit the button and the last forty seconds came back as a short video with its own link. Nothing to download, and no waiting for the broadcaster to post a highlight reel. A browser plugin put the button directly on the stream page, and it reached past Twitch to YouTube and Periscope, which mattered because none of those had clipping of their own.

The company was Finnish, founded in February 2015 in Helsinki, and it ran on venture money from the start. Lifeline Ventures led the backing, the same fund that had put four million dollars behind Applifier's Everyplay a couple of years earlier, so Helsinki produced two different answers to the question of how gameplay video gets shared and buried both of them. Oddshot's own closing letter says the growth numbers were the core value the company was managed against, which is a polite way of saying nobody had worked out the second half.

Twitch announced Clips on 26 May 2016 and had it on every channel by late July. That was the end of the argument, even though the service kept running for another year and a half. Oddshot's team looked at advertising in mid-2017 and found that ad blockers had made the math impossible, then opened up direct uploads to grow the library and discovered that the front page filled with content they described as almost impossible to moderate. The closing letter admits they ended up avoiding the page they had built the company around.

The announcement went up on Friday 9 February 2018 and the site closed the following Monday, 12 February. Three days of notice for a library of clips that had been accumulating since 2015.

~ the dossier ~

~ before twitch had a button ~

It is easy to forget that live video on the internet spent years with no way to keep a piece of it. A broadcast went out, and unless the streamer saved the VOD and someone scrubbed to the right minute, the moment was gone. Oddshot sat in that gap and made keeping a moment as cheap as a keypress, which is why it spread through competitive gaming first. Tournament channels were where it concentrated, because tournaments are where the forty-second moments live.

Twitch's own Clips launch post from May 2016 frames the feature in the same language Oddshot had been using for a year. The platform had watched a third party solve its retention problem and decided to do it in house.

~ what broke it ~

Two things broke at once, and Clips was only the backdrop to both. Advertising was the only revenue model a free clip host could reach, and by 2017 the gaming audience was the single most ad-blocked population on the web, so the inventory was theoretical. Then upload arrived as a growth lever and turned a clipping tool into a general video host, with the moderation bill that comes attached. A five-person company cannot pay that bill.

~ the addressing problem ~

Archive Team's assessment is the interesting part of the aftermath. Most Oddshot clips came from tournament channels, and tournaments tend to put their footage on YouTube anyway, so the raw content mostly survives somewhere. What did not survive is the addressing. For roughly eighteen months Oddshot was how people pointed at a moment, so thousands of forum posts and Reddit threads from 2015 and 2016 contain an oddshot.tv link as the whole substance of the post. Those read as empty now.

A clip host is invisible when it works. You watch the forty seconds, not the machinery that cut them, which is how a service can be everywhere in a community for three years and leave almost no trace of itself once the servers stop. I spent Oddshot's entire run with a full-time engineering job and no particular stake in competitive streaming, so what I know about it is what the dead links say.

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