OnLive demo - could cloud really get game?
Steve Perlman of OnLive demos the cloud gaming service at Columbia NYC (48min video.)
You plug a box into your TV, or a 1MB plug-in into your low-end PC or mobile device. You subscribe to the service (now in public beta) and rent/”buy” access to games. They lease the very high-end main servers the games run on.
Eighty milliseconds from input to output at the player’s end is the magic number they enforce for acceptable interactivity. The servers are in data centers max one thousand kilometres from the player, and use UDP over (I think) circuit-switched connections from pretty much every provider, and optimize for latency elsewhere in the last mile too (e.g. their wireless controllers use a more aggressive protocols than standard console ones.)
They compress on specialized hardware two ways: one on a frame-by-frame basis for the live stream that the player sees with various measures to tune for the connection, correct/conceal errors due to packet loss, etc., and one slightly more conventional media stream IP multicast within the center for replay and broadcast to a wider audience.
Proof of the sufficiently low latency and the plausibility of the business model (hardware is expensive!) will be in the pudding, but this idea sounds less implausible the more I hear…
