Onlive

[Necroticart]

What do you all think of the Onlive service from what I can see as long as they are competitive with pricing it looks real promising and could potentially make buying game consoles and high end computers a thing of the past. Here is a link to the story http://www.gamespot.com/features/6206623/index.html

[versapak]

I expect nothing but fail from this idea.


You don't really own anything you buy. If you can't connect to their service for any reason, you can't play anything.

The level of compression on the video for it to be able to stream fast enough will leave the visuals lacking.

Many service providers have capped overall bandwidth usage. Good luck keeping a comcast account.

Then on top of all that... The internet just isn't fast enough yet. Latency will be an issue. It already was an issue in the demo, and that was under optimal circumstances on a local network.

[Necroticart]

some good points made It will still be interesting to see the service in action to see how good that compression algorithm is. Since it is one area were not much improvement has not taken place and i can definitely agree with you on the capped bandwidth usage the nice part is if it does take off maybe it might force comcast and other providers to upgrade their services for a change which in my opinion should have happen along time ago.

[DJ_Izumi]

Every problem they have except one can be over come by computing power.  Of course, that's not accounting for the cost of the computing power that would effect service cost.

However the latency will kill this.  No matter how well everything works, if you take than 150ms (And that's generous) between input and visual response, it won't work.

I could see this working perfectly in the lab over LAN but 10-15 hops of internet between service and user, no way.  Maybe is ISP's offered it.  Cable companies for example have like 3gbit of bandwidth between their service and the customer that's used for all sorts of digital video already.

But, yeah.  This is a lovely idea but it'll lag, simple as that.

[Kayden]

This just isn't plausible yet.  I can't even RDP without control impairing lag.

[HaRuMaN]

This just isn't plausible yet.  I can't even RDP without control impairing lag.

Nice avatar, BTW.

[Kayden]

  Thanks, I made it myself.   

[shmokes]

What this does mean, IMO, is that there will not be a Playstation 5.  Playstation 4 will come, I'd say, around 2012.  By 2016 . . . yeah, the end.  This concept is clearly happening.  maybe not now, but it's the next thing.  The fact that game development is getting so enormous and expensive that multiple platforms no longer make sense for publishers is just icing on the cake.  This is happening.

[DJ_Izumi]

It already happened anyway.  Remember when computers were actually just dumb terminals all sharing time with a massive computer elsewhere in the building or campus?  Then we put a PC on every desk instead.  This is really a return to an old idea.

At the same time however, this isn't NECESSARILY the future.  We could reach a certian plateau of video game graphics rendering technology and as a result the total cost of such hardware could drop signifigantly.  It's hard to tell which way things will go.

But yes, if the routing means of the internet changes or simply speeds up, this could prove viable in the future.