March Madness starts today – and with that, the next step in our Joost LIVE Test. We’re pretty sure that some things will go wrong, but we’re still really excited. It’s a big milestone for our company.

Over the last couple of months, I’ve learned a lot about the challenges to doing live online video streaming in general, and over a peer-to-peer network specifically – and now I'll attempt to share some of that knowledge with you.

First of all, there’s the need to deliver each “packet” of video sequentially – since Joost uses a P2P network, our network has to constantly figure out which peer to go to get the next “packet.” Since the “peers,” or users, are constantly changing, this is a bit of a complicated task even when delivering on-demand video – and it’s more complex when delivering live video.

If I haven’t bored you entirely yet, you might ask why? Well, because of delay. Delay is always something we’re concerned about, but clearly it’s more of an issue when we’re streaming a live event. You don’t want to wait minutes, or even extra seconds, to find out if a player is going to score on his fast break. (When this happens, it’s called stuttering.)

The other main challenge is the “thundering herd.” For a live event like March Madness, every network has to plan for what could be its peak demand. This is likely to happen in the moments right before the game starts. Suddenly, masses of people flood the network – which might result in crashing the service or, (more likely for us today, at least) a number of people NOT being able to watch the stream.

And that’s pretty much where my technological understanding of our live P2P streaming ends … but from what I understand, these challenges are only the tip of the iceberg. There’s always the chance that there will be a problem with the feed, that someone might unknowingly unplug an important box, or the electricity will go out all over the world … or something like that.

Anyway, we hope you’ll join in and participate in the Joost LIVE Test with March Madness today, and for the next three weeks. The service will get better over the course of the tournament as we find and fix bugs – which we do every time we test (and break) the service.