OnLive -- Very disruptive internet technology to change things as we know it?

Dave Temkin davet1 at gmail.com
Thu Mar 26 21:56:14 UTC 2009


Ravi Pina wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 26, 2009 at 12:39:25AM -0400, Rodrick Brown wrote:
>   
>> Not sure if anyone has followed the recent announcement of OnLive and
>> their new gaming service which will basically allow them to stream
>> video game gameplay output realtime to any commodity PC over a
>> broadband network.
>>
>> Currnet ISP pricing models are not not how many backbone providers
>> today can handle thousands of users simultaneously watch continuous
>> streaming video at 5Mb/s ?
>> If this thing takes off it seem tiered pricing for internet usage
>> might not be as far off as one may think?
>>
>> OnLive is launching the world?s highest performance Games On Demand
>> service, instantly delivering the latest high-end titles over home
>> broadband Internet to the TV and entry-level PCs and Macs.
>>
>> More overview here:
>> http://www.engadget.com/2009/03/24/onlive-killed-the-game-console-star/
>> http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2009/03/24/onlive-the-end-of-seperate-games-platforms/
>>
>> -- 
>> [ Rodrick R. Brown ]
>> http://www.rodrickbrown.com http://www.linkedin.com/in/rodrickbrown
>>     
>
> This is very similar to Roiku/TiVo/Apple TV et al just that they say they
> can do HD with ~5Mb/s circuit.  Has tiered pricing become a hotter topic
> with those products?
>
> I'm not taking any position -- just asking out loud.
>
> -r
>
>
>
>
>   
That's a great question.  Another question I asked, specific to the 
OnLive product is related to *how* they plan on distributing this 
traffic.  If you take the Netflix or Apple or Blockbuster models they 
don't necessarily apply to OnLive, being as their content is static and 
easily cacheable at the edge, whereas I'm imagining OnLive's content is 
far more dynamic and nearly impossible to cache, especially if they're 
shipping a "lightweight" device that won't be doing graphics processing 
(or storage) locally.

-Dave




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