On 26 mar 2009, at 22.56, Dave Temkin wrote:
Ravi Pina wrote:
On Thu, Mar 26, 2009 at 12:39:25AM -0400, Rodrick Brown wrote:
Not sure if anyone has followed the recent announcement of OnLive
and
their new gaming service which will basically allow them to stream
video game gameplay output realtime to any commodity PC over a
broadband network.
Currnet ISP pricing models are not not how many backbone providers
today can handle thousands of users simultaneously watch continuous
streaming video at 5Mb/s ?
If this thing takes off it seem tiered pricing for internet usage
might not be as far off as one may think?
OnLive is launching the world?s highest performance Games On Demand
service, instantly delivering the latest high-end titles over home
broadband Internet to the TV and entry-level PCs and Macs.
More overview here:
http://www.engadget.com/2009/03/24/onlive-killed-the-game-console-
star/
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2009/03/24/onlive-the-end-of-
seperate-games-platforms/
--
[ Rodrick R. Brown ]
http://www.rodrickbrown.com http://www.linkedin.com/in/rodrickbrown
This is very similar to Roiku/TiVo/Apple TV et al just that they
say they
can do HD with ~5Mb/s circuit. Has tiered pricing become a hotter
topic
with those products?
I'm not taking any position -- just asking out loud.
-r
That's a great question. Another question I asked, specific to the
OnLive product is related to *how* they plan on distributing this
traffic. If you take the Netflix or Apple or Blockbuster models
they don't necessarily apply to OnLive, being as their content is
static and easily cacheable at the edge, whereas I'm imagining
OnLive's content is far more dynamic and nearly impossible to
cache, especially if they're shipping a "lightweight" device that
won't be doing graphics processing (or storage) locally.
-Dave
Reading about the solution it is essentially gaming over RDP, so it
is impossible to cache and the test rig shown had noticable delay
even though the processing servers where only 50 miles away from the
show floor [1].
So even if they manage there plan on having servers in "all major
metropolitan" areas, I am not hopefull, but it is a very cool idea
anyway.
[1] http://i.gizmodo.com/5184502/onlive-streaming-games-hands+on-
impressions
/Anders.