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/
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
Ravi Pina 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/
OnLive: The End Of Games Platforms? | Rock Paper Shotgun
--
[ 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.
To overly simplify what they are doing and hopefully answering your
question they are a IPKVM with a ultra efficient high quality video codec.
That said there really isn't any way to cache content that I can think of
since everything is dynamic. As to how do you mean protocol or delivery
platform? The latter sounded like from the press conference that they
will at minimum have roughly 5 or so POPs (from their 'need to be 1000 mi
from the customer') over the country. I suspect the radius will shrink as
they roll out.
-r