Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
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.
David Bass
| For the fourth year in a row, IDC has placed content security provider Websense (NASDAQ: WBSN) at the top of the IDC Worldwide Web Security 2011 –…
How to Make Business Discovery Work for Your Business
Business Discovery takes its cues from consumer apps. Like Google, it encourages us- ers to hunt for and explore data without worrying about or even noticing the underly- ing technology. Their entire experience is working within an intuitive interface to get real-time, self-service results with only minimal training. ...more
Try an easy-to-use set of web-enabled
tools for business-class productivity services. Office 365 provides
anywhere-access to email, important documents, contacts, and calendars
on almost any device.
LATEST HEADLINES FROM YOUR IT
