Vodkaster

» see vodkaster.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Vodkaster was French at the language layer, which is a stricter border than the country one. Everything it was good at happened inside French: the jokes, the arguments about a Bresson restoration, the running gag its own news feed had become by the end. This one is reconstructed from the outside, mostly from the members who spent fifteen years there and sat down to write about it the week it vanished.

It started in Paris in October 2009, founded by Cyril Barthet with two co-founders. The idea that made it different from Allociné was the micro-critique, a film review with a hard character limit of 140. You could not pad. People got very good at the form, and by the end there were tens and sometimes hundreds of micro-critiques posted a day on a site that nobody outside France had heard of.

In early 2014 it merged with a startup called Riplay after raising over 1.2 million euros, and launched the strangest business any film site has attempted. You mailed your DVDs to Vodkaster. Vodkaster held them, streamed them back to you on demand, and resold them for you, taking 99 cents a transaction. It was a legal reading of private copy law stretched about as far as it would go, and the press called it a French Netflix built out of other people's shelves.

Riplay filed for bankruptcy in December 2016. Télérama, the Le Monde group's culture weekly, took the platform over and announced it on 25 January 2017. Barthet described the deal on Twitter as a marriage of love between an editorial team and a cinephile community. The community got eight more years out of it.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the micro-critique ~

The character limit was the product. A film site with unlimited review space fills up with people restating the plot, and a film site with 140 characters fills up with people trying to be funny in one line about Koyaanisqatsi. Vodkaster ran cine-club sessions, participative lists and a game layer on top of that, and gave its most active members an "ambassador" title attached to one specific film they had adopted.

Members who left for Letterboxd afterward kept making the same complaint: the ratings transferred, the tone did not. That is the part no export tool would have saved anyway.

~ the DVD years ~

The 2014 DVD exchange is the reason Vodkaster shows up in French trade press at all. It solved a real problem, which was that people owned physical discs they could no longer be bothered to put in a player, and it solved it by turning a social network into a warehouse. It also put the company in a capital-intensive business it had no capital for, and two years later Riplay was in front of a commercial court.

~ the last email ~

On 13 March 2025 Télérama sent members an email saying the service was closing. Users who tried to log in that same evening found they could not, and the comment threads on French film blogs that night are full of people assuming the site was simply down again, because by then it often was. There had been bugs for months and the feedback address had stopped answering.

Browsing kept working for another eleven days. On Monday 24 March 2025 vodkaster.com stopped resolving to the site, and the only way back in was a raw IP address that someone circulated so members could copy out their own micro-critiques before it went too. Millions of ratings and thematic lists built over sixteen years were deleted with no export mechanism offered. The domain answers today with an Indonesian online casino page, which is what happens to a name nobody renews.

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