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[Ian]

The BBC have an article which defends claims that the OnLive gaming system won't live up to expecations. It's really worth reading, and does seem to suggest that OnLive is going to surprise people when it opens up the Beta:

The founder of online streaming games firm OnLive has defended the technology underpinning the service after accusations it was unworkable. Steve Perlman said critics had not even used the system.

OnLive turns games into video data sent across the net to a hardware add-on, or software plug-in, which decompresses the data back into video. The firm says a revolutionary video compression algorithm and custom silicon makes it possible.

Here's the really interesting part:

OnLive said a broadband connection of 5Mbps will be fast enough for high definition gaming, while 1.5Mbps will be sufficient for standard definition.
At those speeds and with a data centre no further than 1,000 miles away for any gamer in the US the inevitable latency of the net as data has to physically travel across the network is within tolerable limits, said Mr Perlman.

OnLive currently has two servers in the US running a beta version of the service. In order to minimise lag across when the commercial service goes live at the end of 2009 the company has said it will need five data centres around the country.

"The round trip latency from pushing a button on a controller and it going up to the server and back down, and you seeing something change on screen should be less than 80 milliseconds."

"We usually see something between 35 and 40 milliseconds." The games themselves will be running on "off the shelf motherboards" at the data centres.

The company has calculated that each server will be dealing with about 10 different gamers, because of the varying demands games have on hardware.

[rurbaniak]

"We are not doing video encoding in the conventional sense," explained Mr Perlman, dismissing an article in gaming website Eurogamer that said the service was unworkable.

"It's a very ignorant article," said Mr Perlman, who said Eurogamer had conflated issues of frame rate and latency.

"They are independent factors," he said.

I wish Perlman would have gone into it a little more. Just saying that it's an ignorant article isn't enough.

The article brings up good points about how things are done now. Obviously if they are trying to do things the conventional way, it's not going to work, and it'll fail. He could of addressed that without giving away any trade secrets.

[Ian]

Yeah, I'm very interested to hear what they are doing too. This guy knows his stuff about video, so I'm open to the idea of it being more impressive than I first thought possible