[starman]

http://venturebeat.com/2009/03/23/st...d-upside-down/

What do you think? I personally think it's a good IDEA, but the reality of the state of the internet keeps it from being practical for now.

[Dakar V]

I've heard people complain that wireless controllers cause too much input lag.

I just don't see this as being a decent experience for anyone outside the metropolitan areas they claim to be installed near.

[olePigeon]

So long as my ping is over 1000 ms in the evening, I'm not interested. Maybe someone should kick Comcast in the nuts first and force them actually deliver the speeds they advertise, instead of my internet connection being 100% useless from 7:00 PM to 4:00 AM.

[sek929]

Comcast is pretty spot-on for me, Dakar can attest to not only great ping times but stable connections throughout.

I do live a pretty rural area though.

[Mac User #001]

Brilliant idea, done in a way I had not envisioned, but in a way that makes much more sense. I just wonder what percentage of the US will have the 2MB (480P) and 5MB (720P) and 10MB (1080P, not yet available) connections required to use the service. I know I certainly don't, as well as not having an even slightly decent ping time.

At least my ISP is improving my service. My 2am-5am download threshold cap free zone has been changed to a more gracious 1am-6am.

[Dakar V]

Eurogamer on why OnLive is UnLikely to work

The new OnLive game streaming service sounds amazing -- being able to play PC games from basically anything with a TV nearby is a dream for people tired of paying thousands of dollars to upgrade their equipment. But are Rearden Studios' claims about OnLive's capabilities amazing because they're impossible? Eurogamer's Richard Leadbetter thinks so.

First off, there are the hardware requirements. In order to run a new PC game at 720p, Leadbetter notes that each individual instance of the game will require "... the processing equivalent of a high-end dual core PC running a very fast GPU - a 9800GT minimum, and maybe something a bit meatier depending on whether the 60fps gameplay claim works out, and which games will actually be running. That's for every single connection OnLive is going to be handling." So OnLive is going to have to essentially buy one computer for each simultaneous connection it has.

Second, there's the video encoding. "The bottom line here is that OnLive's 'interactive video compression algorithm' must be so utterly amazing, and orders of magnitude better than anything ever made, that you wonder why the company is bothering with videogames at all when the potential applications are so much more staggering and immense." There's a video example of the kind of compression needed even to approach this level of speed, and it's not pretty.

Finally, latency. In order for any of this to work, OnLive has to maintain "sub-150 millisecond latency from its servers at least, and a hell of a QoS (quality of service) to guarantee that this will in any way approximate the experience you currently have at home."

Leadbetter offers a few solutions, but they're as unlikely as Rearden's claims -- like licensing OnLive data centers to ISPs in order to be closer to users.

[Chuckit]

I just noticed: From the creator of WebTV.

[Dakar V]

Originally Posted by Chuckit 

I just noticed: From the creator of WebTV.

So is this an elaborate April Fools prank? Because I had the feeling this was something legit from GDC.

[shifuimam]

The biggest issue I'm seeing right off is how they're going to be able to match the quality and speed of PS3 and 360 games. It wouldn't be that hard to do Wii stuff...that's small potatoes compared to the 1080p games that are out now.

Consoles have ridiculously specialized hardware to be able to process HD video games as well as they do. Trying to stream that high quality over the Internet seems unlikely, at least in the United States where people generally have a 6-10mbps downstream connection, and uploads as slow as 1.5mbps (on cable Internet, that is).

Also, like the quoted article Dakar posted - what hardware are they going to be using the serve the content? Seems like the top-end games like Crysis require the absolute best hardware on the market to play at full quality. Hosting multiple instances of those would require a massive amount of hardware.

I wonder when it's going to go public...

[ort888]

Some more not-so-glowing reports are coming out. There is pixelation and artifacts and there is definite input lag. This is a really cool idea that the world is just not ready for yet. Give it a decade.