About Sidetracked

DVD commentary tracks were a quiet golden age of film criticism. A director, a cinematographer, sometimes an entire cast, talking over their own work for two hours. Streaming dropped almost all of it.

Sidetracked brings the format back and opens it up. Anyone can record a commentary track for any film, and anyone can listen — in headphones, in time with the film, while it plays on the television as normal.

Staying in sync

The hard part isn’t hosting audio, it’s keeping it aligned. Sidetracked runs on a small appliance that watches the streaming app and reads your exact position in the film, then broadcasts it to your phone several times a second. Pause, rewind, jump back twenty minutes — the commentary follows without you touching anything.

Without the appliance you can still browse and play every commentary manually: pick a track, start it at the right moment, and correct the alignment as you go.

For creators

Recording takes an account and a microphone. Publish a track and it becomes browsable, followable, and subscribable as a private podcast feed. Listeners can follow you and see new tracks in their feed.

Your audio, and who can hear it

Commentary tracks are visible to everyone — titles, creators, which films they cover — so a link you share always resolves to something. Playback requires an account. Podcast feeds are personal to you and can be revoked at any time from your account page.