OnLive killed the game console star?
By Thomas Ricker 
posted Mar 24th 2009 2:51AM
posted Mar 24th 2009 2:51AM
What if you could stream games, any game, over a decent broadband connection to your PC or Atom-based netbook at the same quality as the PS3? Would you walk away from your beloved console? That's the of hope of Palo Alto-based OnLive. But this is much more than empty rhetoric -- OnLive's been dropping jaws of the press who've seen it working this week. GameDaily dubbed the play "fantastic" after seeing Crysis streamed "smooth" off a server to a plain ol' MacBook laptop. See, OnLive claims to have perfected the interactive video compression technique so that latency is low enough to support on-line multi-player setups. Broadband connections of 1.5Mbps (71% of US homes have 2Mbps or greater) dials the image quality down to Wii levels while 4-5Mbps pipes are required for HD resolution. At the moment, OnLive is showing 16 high-end titles at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco and expects to be able to release new games within the same window as traditional retail launches. The games can be played on "any PC (Windows XP or Vista) or Mac" without the heavy cash-burden of a high-end graphics card, fast disk, quad-core proc, and truck-load of memory. Otherwise, OnLive plans to release what it calls a MicroConsole with Bluetooth (for voice chat) and optical audio-out that can be connected to your HDTV over HDMI -- pricing has not been announced but it will cost less than a $250 Wii. There's a community element too, of course, with OnLive reps boasting about it operating on an "unprecedented scale." This includes the ability to join live games at any point, the creation of "brag clips" that saves the last 10 seconds of game play for sharing, as well as leaderboards, rankings, and the rest. And if you think publishers will never buy in to the model, think again: Electronic Arts, Ubisoft, Take-Two Interactive, Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment, THQ, Epic Games, Eidos, Atari Interactive and Codemasters are already on-board. Expect OnLive to launch this Winter with monthly subscriptions available in "a variety of different pricing packages and tiers, competitively priced to retail." Damn.
Update: GameDaily's quote of 1-ms latency is in reference to encoding/decoding video, not Internet delay, obviously. Added a few more pics including one of the MicroConsole to the gallery.
[Via FT and Venture Beat]
Update: GameDaily's quote of 1-ms latency is in reference to encoding/decoding video, not Internet delay, obviously. Added a few more pics including one of the MicroConsole to the gallery.
[Via FT and Venture Beat]
Holy shit?
Hot damn.
Not everyone has unrestricted access to the internet.
Wow, a game changing concept.
I do wonder how this could be done commercially, if a server would be hosting Crysis it wouldn't be capable of running a lot of sessions simultaneously and I don't think people will pay a large monthly fee to have their own dedicated server, but then again I assume these guys thought that through.....
I'm going to wait and see how it actually works. The idea is awesome, saving thousands of $$$ and still being able to play your favorite title in HD is worth it. Unless you have last-gen console, like PS3/Xbox360. Sounds like PC killer (PC components are ridiculously priced).
Too bad it will take a LONG time to see it implemented in my country....
@Samboini
then graduate, already!
obviously there would be too much lag, this concept isnt new they've always had remote desktop.
also im guessing they'll encode/decode a stream which also will cause additional delay. about 2 seconds of lag is pretty much considered unplayable.
More like Bullshit. 1ms latency is a misquote, that's for the video encoding, not end-to-end latency. Can we get some editing in here? Latency is (of course) determined by your Internet connection, so typical latency will be 100-200ms, or worse if you're on wireless. That's going to make most games practically unplayable. Playing on this thing will feel like you're stuck in molasses, and if you think Mirror's Edge gave you motion sickness before, wait until you try it with 200ms of input lag.
Furthermore, ISPs lie about speeds and oversubscribe everyone so most people won't have the bandwidth for HD. Everything will look blurry and have artifacts. And if you thought ISPs were complaining about youtube, wait until they start bellyaching about this service. They'll start throttling it straight away, and I wouldn't even be surprised if some blocked it outright and charged an extra fee to unblock it.
Yep - holy crap that is cool! This is a total game changer... I don't think it's feasible over current connections unless you are close to the server but it's a perfect, perfect application for a future 50Mbps+ network. Like we are going to build with the broadband initiative.
I really don't care about TV or video streaming, but game streaming is an entirely different beast. That's just plain awesome.
It could hurt the high end graphics card business, I suppose, but then again those servers will have to do the calculations on something. Which brings me to the only problem that I see with this - how many users can they serve simultaneously? Probably not more than they have graphics cards. Imagine 1000 gfx cards in a room, or 10,000, or if they want to take over PC gaming, 100,000. That poses serious technical problems, and it will be really expensive to boot.
Blah blah blah blah. I'm tired of all these know-it-alls proclaiming that "there's NO WAY this would work" and "OBVIOUSLY, latency will be too much". What the hell do you know? No seriously, what the hell do you know? Don't you think that was the first challenge that they realized they needed to overcome? Do you really think these people are so stupid that some snot-nosed kid commenting on a blog could figure out in ten seconds what they couldn't in all the months that they've been working on this?
Look, I'm not saying that this will definitely work either, that would be just as much of an unfounded conclusion. But just remember, there was a time when people said there was no way we could have DVD-quality live streaming video. Clearly, some people won't have the bandwidth for this service, just as some people don't have bandwidth for streaming video. Also, there will clearly be some latency due to the network, but there will be some savings as well/ How many of you have ever played Crysis? Well, I've played it on my desktop gaming rig (last-gen EQ but hardly anything to sneeze at) and let me tell you all about another lag: HARDWARE LAG.
Who cares that it was local and you didn't have to deal with the network if you had to have a $3,000 rig to play it with smooth framerates? If I could trade hardware lag for network lag in Crysis, let me tell you, it would have been a huge improvement. And that's what will ultimately determine the success of this service - the performance doesn't have to beat consoles as long as the convenience and the low cost of entry is enough to make it worth the user's while.
But will it run Crysis?
Oh, wait...
XD
Ring, Ring, I hear comcast calling.
@Sonicboy -- I get where you're coming from, but the 60-200+ms of lag between input and response is probably more significant than you think. Slowdown on a computer is one thing, but the physics of it are just too extreme -- every 200 or so miles is over 2ms of added lag. Eventually this may be possible over a local network (when we're beyond gigabit, and the network stack has changed... lots needs to be improved), sure... but trying to do mainframe/centralized computing over those distances just isn't reasonable in applications where every ms of latency is noticeable.
And this wouldn't eliminate connection latency in online games, either, unless they only worked within their own system. The beauty of the console model is you get $3000 PC performance (or close to it) with a relatively low 3-figure price tag. This just isn't going to manage to achieve the performance that a local machine can.
@Matt: No, a console gets you about $500 PC performance nowadays. Even when they 360 first came out, a comparable PC didn't cost anywhere close to $3000 considering the fact that console devs didn't use the system as efficiently as they do now.
Now when news about internet speeds pops up on engadget people will say "but can it stream crysis"?
@Tonicboy -- You're right, i love how everyone magically became a seasoned tech consultant.
This company is spending time and money and probably has figured out a way to deliver a playable game experience.
Debate aside though, if they can successfuly implement this idea, THIS IS THE FUTURE! Look at the cost benefits for customers, No more systems requirements, No more spending thousands on a computer system that will struggle to play the newest and greatest games in the future.
With the netbook craze going full swing these guys definately have a shot.
This is not just BS, but ABSOLUTE BULLSH*T. Your going to take HD resolution output from Crysis and then encode it in realtime to take under 5 megabits of bandwidth or so while sustaining at least a 30 frame per second frame rate and not introducing a ton of latency? This is not just BS, but it is blatant EXTREME BULLSH*T.
This wont work for HD content and it sure as well wont work for low latency "shooter" games.
@Junk
Hey, why don't you STFU and wait until it launches to make such accusations. You really think all those publishers would dump money in to something that's simply not going to work? We're not talking about some Chinese knock-off here, as we often see on Engadget. I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt since "OnLive's been dropping jaws of the press who've SEEN IT WORKING this week."
Amen Tonicboy! This company is designing the device knowing the problems with such a proposal, so who are all of these people sitting there stating what is and is not possible? If you don't think it will work or don't like the idea people, then fine, but that doesn't make it fact. I think they are trying something pretty impressive here and it wouldn't kill you to admit that its pretty darn cool so far.
I have had this idea in my head since the start of laptops (for a really fucking long time), just glad that I can finally dump my tv 360, wii, cable service and replace it with my $200 netbbok. Now all we need are laptops that have fold into something the size of an ipod touch (the thing is fucking tiny) oled screen and squishy super thin keyboard
@ Junk
You must be a real fucktard cause you obvoiusly didnt listen to what the FUCKING guy was FUCKING talkin about in the FUCKING video. Oooh srry about that i guess you don't have a fast enough internet connection to watch the FUCKING video eh?
Srry everyone who knows what they're talking about but his guy is obviously an idiot and he doesn't deserve to use technology.
These people had 7 FUCKING years to think about all these problems. They created their own compression technology to make sure the game gets to you at 60FPS and 1ms latency. For all you assholes worrying about lag and shit, stop being bums and get a better connection.
@ Tonicboy: your rant portrays you as much of a 'know it all' as those you accuse. Why does it have to be an either/or situation anyways? FFS.
The reason I don' think it's going to work the way Perlman et al suggest is it's a maximum of 720p resolution in a best case scenario.
Most "hardcore" gamers aren't going to sacrifice uncompressed 1920 x 1200 graphics - which you can get out of a E6300 Core2Duo and Nvidia 7950 playing L4D, or 360/PS3 for a bandwidth intense cloud console. Personally, I would never buy a single player game that I couldn't play properly because my girlfriend is streaming some romantic comedy on Netflix. That's just plain stupid.
That doesn't mean OnLive won't have a good shot, as it brings more titles to the Mac, and to netbooks which can handle the video stream. All this is good for OnLive, especially since the gaming market is still growing, or...
"Don’t get me wrong, as OnLive looks like it could be a decent supplement for the ‘hardcore’ gamer, and may also be an entry point for people looking for something more than a Wii with a lower barrier to entry than a PS3, Xbox 360 or gaming rig. With the video game industry continuing to experience solid growth every year, there’s more than enough room for OnLive, without the ‘hardware is dead’ hyperbole." - http://www.rgbfilter.com/?p=409
Seriously, it would certainly be awesome on a netbook, but not as a primary gaming solution, if you actually DO care about the quality of your Crysis experience beyond the meme it's become.
OMG! I had an idea about something like this a while back(never really thought too much into it, but thought it'd be cool)
I swear I shat a lung just now. this is my holy grail of gaming, as long as it's implemented as well as they say it is. god sometimes I really love the cloud.
Mmmm... unfiltered Lucky Strikes and a Grande Meal. The best lung-shitting money can buy.
Only problem that many ISPs don't offer unlimited usage per month. Mine, for example, is $1.50/GB if you go over 60GB uploaded/downloaded per month. I'd much rather buy physical games.
Same here. I have no interest in this. Not everyone lives in a big city with plenty of broadband access.
I got campus connection that streams 3MB/s so this shouldn't be a problem :P
I'm stuck at 100gb/month.
I'll stick to my PC and Consoles.
They tried something like this before, but it was for Sega Genesis. Every month you would have unlimited access to 30 or so games, and it would change every month. It was offered through our local ISP.
This is the freakin future.
Get a cheapass netbook and play Crysis maxed out anytime anywhere.
It most definately is the future. Stop worrying about hardware and start loving what you can do with it.
Now if they also offer Photoshop, Logic, et.al. I'm in.
Finally no more of these "but will it play crysis?" comments. Anything will now be able to play it now!
exactly. even if this gaming thing doesn't succeed, it's still a major indicator of what to expect in the coming years in terms of how we use computer brains.
@Buis
They actually have an online version of Photoshop. Its not great, but its also pretty usable. And free. I use it on my Wind all the time.
Wow. im very interested.
Remember that Microsoft rep last year, who said we would all be playing games via digital distrubution through only one box under the TV in the next 5 years? Suddenly he doesn't seem so mad after all....
Bill Gates pridicted this 15 years ago in The Road Ahead, an entire chapter dedicated to explain how cloud computing will become the imminent future.
If the future is streamed games, what will happen to Gamestop? You can't trade-in bandwidth ... or can you ... No, I'm pretty sure you can't.
can you preorder bandwith is the real question. and what bonus content do i receive for doing so?
Enron Broadband tried - and look where they are now.
"Enron Broadband tried - and look where they are now."
No, enron bandwith Didn't try, they created the idea so that they could inflate their books even further. After 2 years of talking about how they were going to swap bandwith and had nothing to show for it, people called thier bluff, and the rest of the company was coming down around their ears anyway.
As for the story, I'll believe it when I see it, the idea is pretty good though, especially if fiber/cable speeds keep increasing, the quality only has one direction to go.
to hell with gamestop, cheating over priced for used games. how the hell they buy a 2 week old game for 15$ then resell it for 55$ *^& them all....
Will the be the end of "System Requirements?"
thats what im wondering. will there even be a reason for ATi and nVidia to keep making new GPUs? (for home PCs anyway) why should i ever buy computer hardware ever again? will we ever need computers faster than what have now? what about gaming rig bragging rights? why did i just buy an ATi HD4870 and 26" monitor? what will happen to Steam?
maybe its just because its 3am and i worked 10 hours today but this is making my head explode. i dont know if i want this...
No.
*Requires Broadband Connection **
**50Mbps or higher
Yeah... That's the main reason why I still play on Consoles. Wanna play a 49.99 game? Sure! Just make sure you have a $800 videocard.
will it end console wars? probably people will still fight about console colors:
"I have a white one lozerz!!"
"L.E. Banana Yellow RULEZZ!!"
$800 dollar video card? WTF are you talking about? If you're spending 800 bones for a video card, you're looking in the wrong place or you're getting some super extreme special edition water cooled, solid gold card.
@Kojo87
If I'm reading this news post right then yes, all of that will still be needed. While the end user may not need a high end graphics card to receive video, the provider will still need hardware to handle the game. I mean, I guess in part, you're right. If this technology pans out then the user won't need to invest money every 3 years to enjoy impressive graphics and smooth framerates.
Either way, I wouldn't expect this to start affecting services such as Steam until many, many years in to the future.
@jamesology
Actually it's more like a $200-300 video card,
-as opposed to a $200-600 game console, plus the controllers, etc.
I really hope so, imagine playing crysis on a regular box standard macbook, hell, any laptop! a netbook even!
although, im not really sure that you would WANT to play on a netbook :p
I really think this is the future, but it will be a good 2-4 years before the internet speeds increase to this level for lots of people.
This is interesting.. But computer just cannot replace playstation! The feeling of playing PS3 through TV is different..
yeah... regret...
Err, i already play FPS games on a PC, and it's far superior to a PS3, as you have a keyboard and mouse. And you can use a 360 controller on a PC is you want to as well, not sure about a PS3 controller on a PC.
You can also use a keyboard and mouse on the PS3.
The thing is, I can pop in Mario in my NES and play it, or play one of my numerous PS1 games whenever I want...
Now I know I can emulate all of these games, but the point is my games from almost 20 years ago can still be played whenever I want. This service looks nice, and sure I might buy into it, but I just can't see it replacing physical games altogether like some people suggest. The issue is the same with DRM services: What happens when the servers are shut off? Hopefully that won't be for a long, long time for OnLive(and those DRM servers), but I personally can't see these outfits lasting too long. Oh well, being pessimistic means I can only be surprised!
I don't understand...so it lets you play streaming console games? Streaming from YOUR console? Like if I want to play MGS4 but I don't have a PS3 I won't be able to play?
no it streams games from a server, ON THE INTERTRONS!!!!!!
Gaming just went cloudy...
Why did nobody ever tought of this before?
Because cloud computing stinks, mostly. This is a ridiculous idea for a number of reasons... the amount of bandwidth this service will generate would be obscene, and if it becomes even slightly popular the cash they'll need to spend on Crysis-capable PCs will greatly eclipse any money they'd earn from subscription fees.
Besides, if you really want a game badly enough, why wouldn't you want it in your collection, as opposed to a server thousands of miles away? You stop paying the monthly fee and you lose everything. Couple that with the probability that the service won't perform as well for ordinary customers as it would in a demonstration for investors and select members of the press, and it seems likely that OnLive will follow in the footsteps of GameTap as an ambitious, but ultimately failed venture.
My introduction to cloud computing was through Spotify, and it fucking owns.
When I think about it, it can't be too difficult to implement a similar thing with video games.
Manikedeneko
Besides, if you really want a game badly enough, why wouldn't you want it in your collection, as opposed to a server thousands of miles away?
Most video games I play once and never touch again. It's the rare game that I really go back to months/years later, so a subscription model is better for me.
@kesherz
So after you finish COD, you just throw it away, no online, no prestige, no nothing?
This is monstrous and horrifying. You won't be paying for games anymore, you'll be paying by the minute you play. Every time you game they could charge you for it.
On the flip side, no more cheating!
the subscription model so far hasn't worked for music. if this idea eventually succeeds, i think it will be because it gets rammed down our throats. it would obviously solve the industry's piracy problems once and for all. the only losers would be the hardware manufacturers and, of course, all of us. words like "tier" point to the downside: and i'm confident that, like netflix, they'll find a devious means of penalizing the most enthusiastic users. dropping a quarter for every game is one thing, giving them my credit card number is another!
comments4cheap @ Mar 24th 2009 12:57PM
@kesherz
So after you finish COD, you just throw it away, no online, no prestige, no nothing?
Exactly. More likely sell on Ebay/Craigslist or trade it in. An excellent game but way, way overpriced for 6 hours of content at $60 bucks. Only teens and college kids care about online.
But can it play CS?
Wrong question, the right question would be:
Does it have laser eyes?
No laser eyes, no buy.
will it blend??
NO :O
"will it blend??"
I laughed SO HARD :P
You are my hero :D
But on topic:
If they manage to pull this off, and the price is below ~100$/month, concider me signed up :D
Wubbable....
you have a lot to learn.
But when I press a button, the data has to travel for miles and then the video has to travel for miles back again... surely that will be too laggy.
No lag! The videos are all made up of photons, which of course travel at the speed of light.
I just posted a long-winded version of this post, while you posted basically the abstract of it. Well played, good sir... just look three or four posts down for support >.>.
And @Chris -- funny, but even if this were true and data traveled at 186,282 miles per second... by my calculations, every 186.2 miles from the server (as the crow flies, let's assume) adds another 1ms of lag in each direction (assuming standard request -> response structure, that's 2ms). And that would certainly add up.
Just my thoughts :P
@Matt
Keep in mind, anything under 16ms is fast enough for 60fps, double that for a passable 30fps. There'd be a span of roughly 8 milliseconds to send data and another 8 to receive data back without it being noticeably laggy. The server could be upwards of 1500 miles away if data were traveling at the speed of light and still achieve 60 fps. Obviously data doesn't travel as fast as in your thought experiment, plus there's the requisite processing time, but still...a boy can dream. sigh
@Nick8708
I would very much like to know why photons "obviously" doesn't travel with the speed of light.
@Jay
'Data' doesn't travel as fast because of the obvious nodes it passes as it gets routed.
I don't know about you guys but once my data comes off a fiber backbone and hits Comcast's, routers and coax cable it certainly isn't traveling at the speed of light anymore. What you're implying would take a Fiber connection from their server right to my house... That's NOT gonna happen. You must be living in the land of Fairies, Lollipops, and chocolate sprinkles... and if that's the case will you let me know if there's any Cupcake homes for sale there... I'd like to purchase, interest rates are low, and sound like everyone gets Fiber pulled right to their house.
To all of you saying that data doesn't travel at the speed of light, you are wrong. For your information electricity travels at the speed of light. The only difference between a coax data connection and a fiber connection is that with coax the electrical signals are subject to interference, while fiber doesn't. Plus fiber is capable of more bandwidth (mainly because of the lack of interference). Routers along the way will slow down the data in points, but just barely (probably much less than 1ms). The reason you are seeing slower speed is because of bandwidth.
@ Crazyburns and anyone else who keeps claiming data travels at the speed of light:
No. It does not. I can prove it to you if necessary. Only electromagnetic energy IN FREE SPACE travels at the speed of light. Energy (light, electricity, RF, etc) traveling through ANYTHING ELSE goes slower than the speed of light. That means electricity traveling through copper wires does NOT go the speed of light. It does still go pretty fast. The actual speed is determined by many factors. The telegrapher's (transmission line) equations must be used to solve this type of problem. The geometry and material composition of the transmission line (and its dielectric), as well as the frequency of the signal, determine the propagation velocity.
@ Bob Turbo
Ever made a phone call before?
i cant wait. sign me up. ten times over. the future has partally arrived. and it is cloud computing.
And then all your personal data is stolen from the cloud becuase it is not as secure as a burned CD with your tax documents sitting on a shelf.
As iIsaid in a previous post: this just will not scale. My gaming rig is a GTX 285 SLI, quad core machine with 4GB running a 1200p display. Will these guys deploy the same for every user? I doubt it. You'll get some LOW end POS running at low quality settings. The costs here per user are crazy to deliver a modern gaming experience.
Then there are the folks with their own PCs; users on this service would be at a serious disadvantage ping-wise ot the same server. You just cannot get around the laws of physics.
There are bricks on my chair.
Ummmmm, anybody ever think about the fact that this is, in fact, /impossible/ with our infrastructure? I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but here's a thought: video compression != latency. You can throw 250MB down connections, heck you could probably be on a gigabit LAN with the server itself, and you wouldn't be able to pull it off. When you think about what gamers are used to, the latency they deal with (and notice) is the difference between a 4 and 8 ms response time on their screens. Try pinging a major server like google.com right now, I can wait.
Notice those numbers? On my college campus, I get around 35-45ms. Where I am now? 68ms. That's the amount of time it takes for a packet to get responded to, and even that cut /in half/ would be very noticeable lag (to the point of it being unplayable). So yeah, maybe their system lets the video compression/decompression happen in less than 1ms -- it doesn't matter when your pipe only moves data so fast. I don't like posting those nay-sayer "come on, Engadget, think things true" kinds of posts. I honestly don't. But really. Am I missing something here? Isn't it a week early for April fools?
Guess I'm just not in on the joke.
The joke is just in bad taste. "Too Soon."
Maybe when all the backbones use photo entanglement to drop world wide latency under 10ms, and router chips are in the 100s of terahertz range, then maybe this will be reasonable. Until then only very fast ISPs and LANs will be able to use this.
Now try pinging somebody else. Like Yahoo, for example. For me, if Google takes an average of 80ms, Yahoo takes an average of only 20ms. It depends on the server.
@smp Sure... part of that is how close you are to the server, physically, and how busy the server is. In the end, even 20ms is a decent addition to the latency, and it'll get much worse (approximately 1ms/93miles). This whole thing's a scam to get VC funding then disappear, and the coverage here alone is probably enough to scam somebody into investing. I *really* don't like to be this guy but... come on Engadget, step it up.
Dude, it is not /impossible/. You should playing Quake 3 over at quakelive.com before you ever say anything like that again. Psshh.. impossible... this is America. :)
So you have 35ms in you campus.. bad luck, I get 6-10ms to CS servers in my city.. and it could be better if I had "Fiber to The Home", the future.
The interesting thing is that
Wow, I'm shocked! , put me down for one!
How is this even possible? 100Mbit ethernet cant even handle 1680x1050 over VNC if you have any kind of movie or game going.
I like this idea, but I wish it would allow us to use our Desktop PCs as the Server.
There is streammygame, and it works pretty good, no noticeable delay on video / audio, but it's clunky to use,
anyone know of alternatives?
This isn't possible. It just can't be. You can't push a button your keyboard and have a server 1000 miles away react in less than 1ms. Internet connections aren't that fast. You can ping your local office (if you can get their IP) that is maybe 5 miles away and it'll be laggier than that. And that's to send 4 packets of data, never mind the data you're talking about streaming here.
Either the article is poorly written and is leaving out some vital, revolutionary concept, or this is complete and utter nonsense.
Vital, revolutionary, and physics-defying! That's the best /kind/ of concept!
But yeah, covered above: at the speed of *light*, 2ms lag added every 186 miles from the server (best case).
I actually interned at a company where the guy was working on another startup to do STB's for a lot of VOD stuff (based here in San Diego), helped around the office and on some web work (this was, what, 6 years ago?). He had this same basic idea (streaming PC games over the net to subscribers), and I instantly told him it wouldn't fly, ever. The guy was kinda shady, TBH -- I think he was deported back to Germany a while after my internship concluded.
Bullshit.
First of all, there is NOTHING. NOTHING that you can do to reduce latency. You cannot reduce it through software coding techniques. You cannot reduce it through buying fancy hardware at either end. It is a function of the link between.
Given this, you will never have 1ms latency from your input device in your house to these people's servers and back to your screen. Not unless someone rewires the entire internet between you and these people's servers. And that's not going to happen.
And the idea that they're going to compress the video output of a game like Burnout down to 4-5mpbs? Laughable. It currently pushes 60fps*3 bytes/pixel*720x1280, or 166MB/sec. And they're going to cut that down to 4-5mbps? And do it without noticeable latency? How do you do frame differencing compression if you don't delay the signal a few frames so you can calculate the differences? And even if you get the video down to 4-5mpbs, don't forget the audio!
These people are complete charlatans. This is the new pixelon. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixelon
im shocked how many people above bought into this article...
Have you ever seen a DVD-Rip where a whole DVD-Movie was compressed via DivX or Xvid into a package of 700MB without noticably loosing any visual quality (only with a good source and good compression codec of course, but thats given at this OnLive company)? You are reffering to uncompressed video and thats like comparing a BMP to an JPG and then laugh at anyone who is trying to tell you that you could compress a 35MB BMP to an 3MB JPG without loosing any visible quality (to the avarage consumer taht is of course). Omgzorz, it's compression 10:1!! It's not possible!! Well, it is, oviously. Or have you ever calculated why movies even fit on a Blue-Ray in HD. If you wouldn't use video-codecs on a standart blue-ray you would only be able to put a couple of minutes of HD-video on it. Video streaming service are perfectly possible, in fact there already exist thousands of them so I have no idea what you are even talking about.
What is your problem? It's fine to be skeptical, but it's not cool to act like you know the answer to everything. The cloud computing has already began. Try playing at http://www.quakelive.com/
It's.. seamless..
kihaki:
No, this isn't 100:1 compression, this is compression of over 200:1. The source data computation is in megaBYTES and the listed rates for the games (4mbps) is in megaBITS.
Let me compare to your DVD. A DVD is 720x480 (at most) x 3 byte by 24fps. That's 24.8Mbytes per second. And you compress it to 700MB for a 100minute movie. That's 7 megabytes per minute, or about 1mbit/second.
Now this company says they can compress 2.5x as much data (60fps instead of 24fps) to the same size (they say 1mbit for SD games)? And they can compress a frame in less than 1ms? They're full of crap.
And again, those examples above ignore the audio. Audio adds another 0.3mb/sec or so (about 0.5mb/sec for 5.1 audio). To the bandwidth needed.
But screw that, that's all peanuts next to the latency. In another article, Perlman says he will have 5 servers nationwide. There's no way the average person is going to be under 40ms from that server. That means a round trip latency of at least 80ms. That means a responsiveness delay of 1/12th of a second. That means that anything you do with the controller doesn't have any noticeable effect on your screen for 1/12th of a second. Do you remember the last game you played with a frame rate of 12fps? Did it seem responsive to you? And this is before you talk about temporary increases in latency. Remember, the game has to be able to work not just with the average latency, but the maximum experienced.
grimm240:
I do actually know what I'm talking about here. If you have a problem with the idea that someone on the idea might actually know something, that's your own personal problem.
These guys are having us all on. They're deluding themselves and lying to us.