OnLive plans to deliver streaming video games

Jake Widman
Thursday, 26 March 2009 03:25

Your IT - Home IT

A startup plans to enable online video gaming on personal computers or TVs -- eliminating the need for gaming consoles like the Xbox or PlayStation -- by next winter.

The company, OnLive , has devised a way to compress video game information so that it can be sent over broadband connections and still provide real-time response. The games themselves will run in the OnLive data center; PCs and Intel-based Macs will be able to access them directly, while to play on your TV you'll need a "MicroConsole."

The games will supposedly be the same games that people play on consoles and computers already. At the Game Developers Conference going on in San Francisco, OnLive showed people playing "Crysis," a fairly demanding shooter for PCs. On their website, the company displays such popular and highly regarded games as Bioshock, World of Goo, Lego Batman, Mirror's Edge, and Prince of Persia.

The big question, of course, is how well OnLive can deliver on its promises of on-demand games with instaneous reactions. Sharing a DSL line between a computer and an Xbox already degrades online gameplay (or so I hear from the other room every time I try to download something). Adding streaming of the game itself to that mix is going to be a challenge.

If it catches on, it's likely to be a challenge for ISPs, too. The company estimates the games and gameplay will require the transmission of about a gigabyte an hour, a rate matched only by streaming video. ISPs are already trying various tricks to accommodate the growing demand for video, from managing traffic to charging more for extra bandwidth.

In the meantime, OnLive is in internal beta and signing people up for the public beta, to start this summer.