Joost Blog

For the past two Thursdays, SK Gaming, one of world's top WoW (that's World of Warcraft, for those of you not in the know) guilds has been taking on the Sunwell instance live on Joost. They're going at it again later today, (and next Thursday too), so we thought, what better time then to tell you what goes on behind the scenes here when we do a test of our live service?

(Full disclosure - this actually comes through my colleague Guido, who handles most of our support issues - so apparently, your inquiring minds want to know.)

Here on the scene, in Leiden, we have a group of people on standby. During March Madness, this meant that people didn't get much sleep - fortunately, the WoW event is held at 8 p.m. CET (2 p.m .EDT) so our LIVE team is much more rested these days. The technology that powers LIVE is complex, to say the least, and though it's working better every week, we want to make sure that there are real live people available to solve any issues and guard the streams and their delivery.

We find out about issues viewers might be having through the Channel Chat (go to My Joost -> Widget Menu and choose Channel Chat if you want to join). A bunch of employees participate on the Channel Chat to answer questions and make sure we work as quickly as possible to solve any issues.

How is it working? Well, it's getting better every week. Check it out at SK Gaming Does Sunwell LIVE, (by the way, my sources tell me that Sunwell is the hardest WoW instance) and let us know what you think. We're also re-"broadcasting" each instance through our VOD service, so if you want to catch up on all the action before tonight's raid instance, you can check them out here.