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Could Microsoft or Google buy OnLive?

Posted by Al Warmington on Wed 1 Apr 2009

Cloud gaming may be the next battleground for warring web giants

When OnLive announced its ground-breaking new cloud gaming service last week at GDC, it fair to say it drew a crowd. The promise of cutting-edge games with top of the range graphics from a box both smaller and cheaper than anything on the market today seems almost too good to be true. But was the whole show merely an attempt to grab the attention of the big corporations, in the hope of buyout?

 

We had our doubts about the ambitious claims being made by the OnLive founders, but none as serious as those voiced by Eurogamer’s Richard Leadbetter, who called the technical feasibility of the whole service into question.

 

However, the guys at TechRadar have taken a closer look at the problem, enlisting the aid of Guy de Beer, CEO of another set-top box streaming service, Playcast Media. “Leadbetter is mistaken with regards to two assumptions - one - that game video should be treated as "natural" video, and - two - that OnLive is streaming standard MPEG video," explains de Beer.

 

He also outlines – although without sharing too many secrets – the ways in which some of the streaming issues could be overcome, problems which have been described by critics as simply impossible to resolve with current technology.

 

The big unknown is how the latency stumbling block is going to be tackled. Fair enough, the GDC live demonstration was widely reported to be impressively smooth and lag-free, but outside the tightly controlled conditions, the results are likely to be markedly different.

 

"In order to compete with the consoles, OnLive will have to build a distributed data centre which will be in every local network, invest serious money in network capacity and buy all the bandwidth to support it” the Playcast boss suggests. And needless to say, that’s going to take a lot of investment cash.

 

It could be the telecoms companies who already support services like IPTV in a similar manner, or it could be “someone like a company that starts with an M, ends with a T, is based in
Redmond WA, and has been trying to build such a parallel private network for a product that starts with an X and ends with a Box". Or it could be someone else trying to beat Microsoft at every turn and who’s already very sold on the cloud computing concept.

 

Will Google be the next addition to the console war?

 

Link: OnLive (via TechRadar)