Title image courtesy of Paul "Redeye" Chaloner
Oleg Kogut, the co-founder of own3D.tv and pioneer in streaming platforms for esports, passed away of cancer earlier this month.
Only one week after the gaming community lost Alexander "Flow" Sazonov, the Russian Dota 2 offlane player, to cancer, a second battle has been lost to the disease as Oleg Kogut passed away on October 4th.
Kogut was the co-founder of own3D.tv and Quake champion.
Kogut began his career as a professional Quake 3 player under the name ‘d1ablo’. In August 2009, Kogut launched own3D.tv. In the early years of streaming, Twitch was not what it is today. Then, it was known as Justin.TV and the competition between own3D.tv and Justin.TV/Twitch lasted for a number of years, before own3D.tv chose to shut down the platform in January 2013.
Many of the most known figures in the gaming community that began their careers in the early stages of esports paid tribute to Kogut's contribution.
After the closure of own3D, Oleg went to join Dailymotion, where he started working on the next Twitch competitor. Alas, due to internal disagreements in the management of the video hosting service, the upcoming platform was not able to gain momentum and was not launched as a standalone product.
Unfortunately, by the end of his work at Dailymotion, Oleg was diagnosed with cancer. From that day on, the life of Oleg and his family was evenly split between work and fighting the disease.
Despite his disease, Oleg had been consulting ESForce on development strategy since its inception, and later he founded a new company, Birdsy.
The key concept behind Birdsy was not esports related but rather aimed at those who are interested in watching the wildlife outside their house or apartment. Based on machine learning, the camera records and identifies dozens of species of birds and animals, making short videos, available through the application on your phone.
Oleg hoped that the technology, incorporated in Birdsy AI, would find its further use in studying the impact of global warming, research projects, and much more.
