Skully — What a great few months it has been for TF2 hasn’t it? First we had the amazing Nations Cup and the conclusion of that, with England taking home the Gold, and the money. Then we had i46, the biggest TF2 LAN tournament ever, with almost 500 TF2 players turning up to see the Americans school us Europeans in how to play TF2, and taking home first and second, kudos to you ‘mericans.  And to top it all off, ETF2L started their 13th season, and while 13 might be unlucky for some, it has proved to be quite an interesting season, with new teams and new lineups, we went into the season wondering who would be in the final 4 for the finals, and to be honest, we are still in the dark about who will be those 4. While all this has been going on, we still have our resident Irishman Admirable going on about his “caster of the season” award, and well deserved I may add, however, come the end of Season 13 he may not retain it (competition, we all love it)

Another success has been VanillaTV, at the start of Nations Cup we moved to TwitchTV for our streaming service, and with a lot of positive results. We started seeing standard casts that would draw 150-200 people max on our previous stream, to almost 2000 for most streams. And then come LAN, hitting numbers we haven’t seen before, with 4000 viewers for the lower bracket final! At that moment, we were the 4th highest viewed channel at the time, surpassing Starcraft 2. With these high numbers we have helped introduce TF2 to more people and showed the world that TF2 isn’t dead just yet.

Of course, not everything is plain sailing, there has been issues. Yes, we know there is still connection issues and crashes during casts, and the usual delays. These are out of our control, what is in our control is our Youtube page. As part of our system and our checklist of items to do each cast is to upload the VODs of all our casted matches onto our Youtube channel. Sadly since i46 this hasn’t been the case. The issue comes from time and access, I wont put you to sleep with the system but in a TL;DR format, to get the maps onto Youtube it requires cutting up the original VOD into the parts, then downloading the parts, then taking each of those and uploading to Youtube. Now this isn’t as easy as it sounds as it requires going through the VODs to find each part, then you need a decent connection to download and upload the high quality stream. This takes time, even so when splitting up the VODs from i46 as were were live throughout all 3 days. Its almost like when you have homework/course at School/High school/College/University, if you leave it on the backburner and let it pile up, you have a lot to do with little time to do it in. This was our situation.

Over the last week, Skyride has been working on a system to enable us to cut down the time in processing the TwitchTV VOD onto Youtube without the need of downloading and uploading. The system is up and working, and throughout this weekend we have been working on our backlog of games and VODs to provide you with our casts onto our Youtube page. All these should be completed by the weekend, however, to stop a massive spam of uploaded videos, we will be releasing the videos throughout the week. We have already started with this, today we released some i46 content including an interview with  Salamancer  and through the week VODs like the Nations Cup Final will be released.

Once this backlog is cleared, we will continue to produce our Youtube VODs within 24 hours of the cast. I’m no politician, but I can promise that there shouldn’t be any more backlogs and you will be able to enjoy our casts on Youtube