OnLive One Step Closer 175
hysma writes "It looks like OnLive, the remote gaming system that streams HD video over the Internet, is one step closer to becoming reality, according to an article on DSL Reports in response to a lengthy video presentation by founder & CEO Steve Perlman at Columbia University. Perlman demonstrated the UI, spectating, using the service on an iPhone, and other features."
Re:Is this a giant scam? (Score:2, Informative)
I agree that on the face of it this looks like it won't work, but I can see many mitigating circumstances that means it just _might_ work.
I think there's a small chance that they might actually be able to pull it off, and if they do it really is a game-changer.
A couple of things that makes me hesitant to call everyone "retarded" if they don't dismiss this before it has even seen the light of day:
- They are aiming for The Long Tail of gaming, and I think it's easy to underestimate just how gigantic the amount of cash is in this tail
- Not ALL games are hyper timing sensitive
- Multiplexing hardware means the same computer can serve Stan in Portland and Sanjay in New Delhi at different times a day (but admittedly only if there are good pipes or the game is not super lag sensitive).
- Computer power can be spent or sold in other ways when it's not used for the OnLive gaming system (just look at how Amazon has managed to use their knowledge of scalability into a nice side business that doesn't involve books)
- For the most timing sensitive games (1st person FPS), you remove the client-to-client lag, which means the server can run a single cohesive view of the world, and pipe that to the players (so you get rid of one type of lag, which might allow for the server-to-client-video lag with no problem)
- If this gets big or they have good partner deals from the beginning, games might get engineered specifically for this network topology from the game developers side, which might take steps to minimize lag problems (I can come up with quite a few ideas just off the top of my head)
- If the video algorithm is designed for gaming (as it is), they can degrade quality in the video compression in a smart way to keep the lag to a minimum - who cares if the leaves on the trees in your peripheral vision are a bit blocky when you're in a firefight in Crysis)
- They have a few pretty strong industry profiles on their company roster
That said, I am of course also highly sceptical, but I see a sliver of a chance that they might pull it off. And if they do, I really think it will be a game changer (pun intended).
Re:Is this a giant scam? (Score:5, Informative)
You obviously didn't watch the video at all. While you're being an asshole about the idea, the guy presenting during the presentation covered all of your strawmen.
1) "fill instance of the most powerful PC you can throw at it" - Uh, no. When you move from workstation class hardware to server hardware, the "ceilings" change. But, for games like Crysis, they do, indeed, use a big GPU per instance.
2) "720p video in realtime that no codec today can deliver" - Too bad you didn't watch the video. Turns out, this is the same team that brought us QuickTime before video codecs were even discussed. He also describes exactly how they pulled it off, started with scrapping the stream-based design paradigm, using a feedback loop based design paradigm, and creating a new encoder that looks great in motion encoded and decoded in real time (as one of the weaknesses, you can't pause it or it looks like shit).
3) "Presumably happen on the same computing hardware..." - Actually, no. As the presenter describes, the codec taxed even the dual quad core xeons that it was developed on. Then they fabbed custom chips that do nothing but implement the encoding algorithm. It's entirely hardware accelerated encoding, two chips per user on custom boards.
I also thought the entire process sounded like a big stupid scam, but before I declared the mighty victory of common sense, talking out of my ass, I went ahead and watched the video.