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Hey guys,

For those of you interested in the new OnLive service that is supposed to be coming out this year, check out this interesting 48 minute video presentation. I'm only a few minutes in but thought I'd pass it along

http://www.viddler.com/explore/gamertagradio/videos/160/169.707/

Make sure you start it from the beginning

In my opinion OnLive will NOT help the gaming business. If I want to game, I want to own the game. I do not want to stream it from the internet. Internet coverage/speed is by far not fast enough for this kind of applications.

Not if you have FIOS. Really, if all people had this attitude then technology would never advance.

And besides, no one really "owns" games these days anyway. DRM takes care of that. Which would you rather have: a game with only 3 installs, or one that can be played anywhere on any machine with decent internet access? Can't you see the benefits? IMO, I think hard copies of games, music, and movies should be non-existent. This is a good push in that direction.

I think steam shows how we can have the best of both worlds: Always available via internet but also on the local machine.

I much prefer having an actual physical copy of something to a downloaded file or something. Obviously for music this has it's advantages anyway, what with the whole sound quality of vinyl/digital debate, but obviously those don't apply here. Nevertheless I would never pay to download something if I could get it for free or pay for it in physical form - the only thing I've ever paid to download was Killing In The Name the other week (although I did that many times).

I have no problem with the idea of people being able to access stuff over the internet, but I think your idea of "No-one should be allowed to own physical copies of things" is rather harsh, as many people prefer it, and I wouldn't like to have to link up to a computer or anything every time I wanted to listen to a CD or watch a film.

In my opinion that looks insanely awesome. Assuming it would work on my internet well, I would surely buy that.

I love having Spotify, because it means I get to listen to a large range of music I couldn't before...and legally, this has meant my wide taste in music can be pleased and I can listen to what I want based on my moods, however, it is nice to have a physical copy in your hand, but I'd be willing to give that up for a reliable service that's fair and convenient. Though of course, music can still be purchased, I mean as a radio DJ (even for student radio) I can't use Spotify to play music over the air and we must own copies of the music we play. Also, Spotify doesn't work on an iPod classic or traditional MP3 players. Nor are Spotify's alternatives available. But Spotify and its alternatives I think are a progressive way to get music out to music lovers and cutting down piracy...or so I perceive.


OnLive I'd treat with the same principle, I mean the video shows that, actually, it IS realistic, even based on how unreliable the internet can be, OnLive takes that into account - they go into depth about the algorithm in the video and it has me convinced, and well, the demonstration shows that it works.

For SD, I believe the speed needed is 1.5 megabits per second and 5 megabits per second for HD. For coverage, it would require many OnLive servers, essentially if you're a 1000 miles within distance of one, you can use it. I believe the US is already covered. They have considered the server routes of ISPs and how they might make the distance data traveled longer, but deals with ISPs has solved this issue. Watch the video basically, it has me convinced and it has ISPs AND top game companies convinced too.

Though my main concerns are:

How quickly will servers be spread? (In order to give coverage to more people, like us Brits)
And what are we looking at for cost? I can't imagine the service to be free.

As for death of the CD/DVD, I don't think it necessarily will be, perhaps for PC gaming due to piracy (piracy is kind of ruining PC gaming as it is). But even if it did, I see it as solving more problems than creating.

Looks promising, thanks for sharing the link. People who think the idea is completely unrealistic and would never work annoy the heck out of me (not that there's been any in this thread yet). Do you really think that the brilliant engineers and computer scientists working on this haven't thought about things like lag?

"Yes! We've finally finished prototyping this brilliant idea."
"Wait a second, why is it lagging?"
"Crap! I didn't even think about that! Oh well, we'll just rig our presentations and get people to buy it anyways."

I fall just inside the 1000 mile "as the crow flies" distance from the Santa Clara location, but so far I haven't heard anything about Canada being part of the fun.

You don't develop something like this then sit around waiting for technology to advance so it works in every conceivable situation. You wait until it works well enough in a niche and then use that niche to establish the brand. Otherwise you risk someone else taking the same idea and stealing the thunder.

I don't think there has ever been a new method of delivering multimedia content over the internet that wasn't introduced before the network was capable of dealing with it.