Company Onlive promises "Cloud Rendering" to deliver gaming over innernets

[Crixx_Creww]

http://i.gizmodo.com/5181840/onlive-streaming-games-turn-any-tv-or-pc-into-a-bleeding+edge-gaming-machine

Through the use of a settop box and lots of bw, Onlive promises gaming on any pc or tv, regardless of specs once you have the bw, through the use of rendering on their server farms and delivering content back to you in supposedly 1ms,yea right.

[Eroo]

Sounds good in concept but I dont see this catching on. For full HD resolutions you need at least a 5mbit connection plus I'm really skeptical about the 1ms. I see this being more possible in 10 years, maybe not so much now.

[Doomtack]

I was always thinking about this concept even before they announced this... i really hope to see this get somewhere, it'll be like a concept (dream?) come through...

[woodyear99]

I wonder if this would take off, we already doing DLC on Xbox Live why not stream the whole game if bandwidth is good enough. That's the direction people say movies goin in anyway....

http://pc.ign.com/articles/965/965535p1.html

http://www.pcworld.com/article/161852/onlive_will_it_beat_xbox_360_ps3_and_wii_at_their_own_game.html

GDC 09: OnLive Introduces The Future of Gaming
Next-generation "cloud" technology could change videogames forever.
by Chris Roper

March 23, 2009 - Before I dive into what OnLive is and how it works, let me start by saying that you should read every word of this article as this service has the potential to completely change the way games are played. If it works and gets proper support from both publishers and gamers, you may never need a high-end PC to play the latest games, or perhaps even ever buy a console again. That is not an exaggeration.

Just announced at this year's GDC, OnLive is an on-demand gaming service. It's essentially the gaming version of cloud computing - everything is computed, rendered and housed online. In its simplest description, your controller inputs are uploaded, a high-end server takes your inputs and plays the game, and then a video stream of the output is sent back to your computer. Think of it as something like Youtube or Hulu for games.

The service works with pretty much any Windows or Mac machine as a small browser plug-in. Optionally, you will also be able to purchase a small device, called the OnLive MicroConsole, that you can hook directly into your TV via HDMI, though if your computer supports video output to your TV, you can just do it that way instead. Of course, you can also just play on your computer's display if you don't want to pipe it out to your living room set.

When you load up the service and choose a game to play (I'll come back to the service's out-of-games features in a bit), it starts immediately. The game is housed and played on one of OnLive's servers, so there's never anything to download. Using an appropriate input device, be it a controller or mouse and keyboard, you'll then play the game as you would if it were installed on your local machine. Your inputs are read by the plugin (or the standalone device if you choose to go that route) and uploaded to the server. The server then plays the game just like it would if you were sitting at the machine, except that instead of outputting the video to a display, it gets compressed and streamed to your computer where you can see the action. Rinse and repeat 60 times per second.


To make this happen, OnLive has worked diligently to overcome lag issues. The first step in this was creating a video compression algorithm that was as quick as possible. The current solution only introduces one millisecond of lag to encode the video, which alone is completely unnoticeable to you. Obviously, a fast internet connection is required on your end to stream the gameplay video. A 1.5 mbps connection (which is usually what base-level DSL is rated at) is required for standard-definition video (480p), while a 5.0 mbps connection is required for HD (720p). The actual necessary speed is a tad less than advertised, so as long as your provider says you have these speeds, you should be OK.

Your user page will show the last games you've played and more.
The cool thing here is that your only requirement is a capable internet connection and some sort of computer. In theory, you should be able to play Crysis on a netbook. A handful of us have played the game, at its highest settings, on a MacBook Air with the service. Not only is the game not normally available on the Mac (outside of running Boot Camp), but the MacBook Air is hardly a gaming device, and yet we were able to hop in and play it as smoothly as a nicely-specced machine. We also played Burnout Paradise on a similarly-equipped PC laptop, and despite how quick that game is, it ran and played fine as well.

Do the games run at 60fps? Technically, yes, but the video stream makes it feel less so. They're still smooth, but Burnout wasn't as brisk as it is on a PS3, for instance. But make no mistake - everything we tried was completely playable (and most importantly, quite responsive), and being that you're able to play these games without any dedicated hardware, that's a huge, huge thing.

As for the MicroConsole itself (which, again, is optional), the device is give or take about the size of a PSP game box and maybe twice the height. In other words, it's pretty tiny for a gaming "console". It features two USB inputs (you can use a hub if you need more), a mini-USB port for power, optical audio output and HDMI video output. There's also Bluetooth support for voice or wireless joysticks, keyboards and mice. Obviously, if you want to use this thing with an older TV, you'll need to pony up for some conversion hardware, but OnLive stresses that the MicroConsole itself will be fairly cheap. We'd expect it to be no more than $100, and a $50 price tag is certainly not out of the question.

With regards to the service itself, OnLive will work as a paid subscription service, similar to Xbox Live. OnLive isn't talking about pricing yet, which probably isn't even finalized internally yet, so we'll have to wait and see how that pans out. Once you're online, you'll have access to a Friends list, an online profile where other people can see what you're up to, your tied account stuff (which houses your save games and things like that), and Brag Clips. Brag Clips are 10-second videos of your favorite gaming moments, and the system works sort of like an instant replay on a DVR. Regardless of what game you're playing, you can hit the Brag Clip shortcut and OnLive will then save the last 10 seconds of your action for viewing and sharing later. Other folks can view your clips, and you can send them out to your friends to, well, brag.

The games chooser will show you live video of other people playing.
As for the games themselves, while it will vary by title and publisher, you'll have a number of ways in which to purchase them. You can outright pay for a game and own it indefinitely, or you could opt to rent a title for a specified amount of time. This last bit is especially cool for PC titles as that sort of market simply doesn't exist as piracy would run rampant. But since everything is housed online, OnLive won't be subject to piracy, so game rentals can easily take place. Again, that'll be up to publishers on a per-title basic, but the possibility is certainly cool.

And of course, most games will have a demo available for play, which like everything else, launches instantly with zero downloading. OnLive is hoping that even if hardcore gamers stick with buying games as per usual and playing content locally on their own high-end rigs that its service will be a great place for trying out demos as you won't have to take time to download anything.

The MicroConsole is small, but thanks to the servers, ultimately powerful.
A number of publishers have already signed on to have their games launch on the service, including EA, Take-Two, Ubisoft, Epic, Atari, Codemasters, Warner Bros. and Eidos. While we were able to play Crysis and Burnout Paradise and noted games like Grand Theft Auto IV on the intro screen, these titles may only be demo software for the time being as OnLive plans to launch with newly-released software when it goes live. We're hoping Crysis sticks around as some of us will finally be able to play it.

As for the launch timeframe, OnLive is going to have an open (though invitational) beta sometime during the summer, and plans to fully launch the system late this year (technically winter 2009).

[Netizen1]

Crixx beat you to it this morning

Merged.

[woodyear99]

http://www.pcworld.com/article/161852/onlive_will_it_beat_xbox_360_ps3_and_wii_at_their_own_game.html

Hopefully in the future distance will not limit the service...  "I know, they tell us that the server farm locations need to be within a 1000 mile radius, so I'd be interested to see if the service can still deliver the goods if I'm playing from someplace a little more remote. That said, yeah, it was a fairly solid frame rate -- what would you say, about 30-35 frames per second? There was a little bit of hinkiness, but not too much."

----------------------------------------------------

BTW Warner Bros. backing this.....

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/content_display/news/e3i122eef64e5ea3297dced6afe27455ac6

OnLive aims to provide high-end play on computers, TV

By David Ward

March 23, 2009, 09:15 PM ET
SAN DIEGO -- Warner Bros. is among the financial backers of a new gaming venture, OnLive, that promises to leverage cloud computing and broadband connectivity to provide high-end play of the latest video games on PC, Mac or TV.

To be unveiled Tuesday at the Game Developer Conference in San Francisco, OnLive is the brainchild of Steve Perlman, who founded WebTV a more than a decade ago.

Perlman described OnLive as a revolutionary, on-demand game platform that can deliver the latest and most advanced games on any TV via a sleek, inexpensive MicroConsole or on almost any PC or Mac. "You can have instant access to games," he said in an interview. "You just click on it and it goes."

Unlike current consoles like the Sony PlayStation 3 or Microsoft Xbox 360 -- or even the PC -- OnLive will have all the graphics, assets and game play taking place on its servers and then streamed in real-time using a special interactive compression technology that took seven years to develop.

Set to launch in winter 2009, OnLive is aimed at the more than 70% of U.S. households with a broadband connection. The company plans to charge a monthly subscription for access and then offer a number of different pay programs ranging from rental to outright purchase of games.

"By putting the value back into the games themselves and removing the reliance on expensive, short-lived hardware, we are dramatically shifting the economics of the industry," Perlman said. "Delivering games instantly to the digital living room is the promise game fans have been waiting for and OnLive makes that promise a reality that's affordable, flexible and focused on their individual needs."

Formed out of the Reardon Labs incubator in Palo Alto, Calif., OnLive is backed by financing from Maverick Capital, AutoDesk and Warner Bros. The company also has gathered an impressive management team that includes Perlman, former Eidos Interactive CEO Michael McGarvey and Charles Jablonski, former vp broadcast and engineering at NBC.

Although it's eventually going to compete with gaming heavyweights such as Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft, OnLive already has lined up the support of top publishers such as Electronic Arts, Ubisoft, Take-Two Interactive, Eidos, Atari and Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment.

[ViCe]

What is OnLive?
http://venturebeat.com/2009/03/23/steve-perlmans-onlive-could-turn-the-video-game-world-upside-down/

10 reasons why onLive would fail
http://www.gameplayer.com.au/gp_documents/OnLive-Fails.aspx

wat u guys think is it the future or do u agree with the reason it fails

[Crixx_Creww]

already mentioned
please merge someone.. no energy to do so

[shivadee]

Positives about OnLive

1. If this broadband compressed video download is revolutionary, if IF the product fails they can market the technology to the consoles and it helps the industry greatly.

2. NO PIRACY. You cant pirate something you dont HAVE on your HDD. since you are streaming on a server with EVERYTHING, you aint got nothing to hack.

3. Security. This is following the MMO scheme. All your data and saves are on THEIR server. No excuses for lost data unless you purposely delete this.

4. Watching their 1 hour conference these guys have a SOLID idea of the situation. They know the ropes and knows what it can and cannot do.

5. Promotion of titles via LIVE online gameplay. What better way to promote a title. Why bother watching a trailer with 80 percent cinematic when you can watch the full gameplay as it is via the gameroom.

Why this thing will fail

1. We are not ready for this yet I think. Both technologically and mentally.
FIRST - OnLive claims a 1.5 MB connection for SD and 5MB for HD. I do not believe this. Their demo's were played for about 3 mins each. We all know lag starts to kick in a little further down the road. And we still have not seen online matchups with 16+ people onscreen.
SECOND - People want a tangible product. Mean they like to have their box in hand. It is slowly dissipating however, with SONY's PSN downloads it is quietly creeping into peoples minds that it doesnt really matter. However you cant just throw someone into this and say "okay go" like OnLive is doing.

2. The "flawless" online gaming is not as flawless as they advertise. Its not a pipedream but its quite ambitious. Essentially when this is RELEASED you can ONLY play in the US. There will ONLY have 3 servers, East, Central and West. And ONLY those areas can play, and play SEPARATELY from each other. East CANNOT link to West. There is too much lag. So just FORGET about Trinidad for now, we are not even considered part of the gaming industry. They will branch out, but that will be later.

3. You dont open a restaurant if you are not the chef. These people make NOTHING. NONE of those titles are exclusive and of all the ones we saw there the ones we want, we already OWN. They are forgetting a key thing, WHY do we own a PS3, 360 or a Wii? It isnt because of just competition, its because we want to play HALO or Killzone or Mario Kart. None of that is offered here, since they are first party systems. We dont need to pay for another service to play the SAME games, with an obviously smaller community. The initial phase of this release is going to be tough on this company.

4. Lack of servers means lack of gamers, meaning dead rooms! Exactly what it says. You are only able to play in the East or West zones, you are only going to have x amount of people with this product..meaning you already have an issue. These people KNOW how to negotiate with their providers, they KNOW how to talk about the download issues. What they DO NOT KNOW is what the community wants and why they want it.

5. Offline? oh sh!t - What you gonna do when you are offline? when you are out somewhere with poor connections or wifi? You cant play a SINGLE damn game that you PAID for.

6 - Powerful servers? Please. I understand and HOPE they know what they are saying. But please dont compare your server PC's to even the BEST friggin home PC's for gaming available. You are talking about a ONE person system vs one for (hopefully) MILLIONS. To add to this these guys can take a dose from Blizzard. With a near 12 MILLION people on WoW you can bet your @SS they know about server maintainability. 250 servers for WoW in the US ALONE dedicated to WoW. They still have downtime (scheduled) with random crashes maybe once a month at the most (not bad atall) that only last about 5 mins. That is a SOLID mc server....12 million x 15 US a month. HALF of that has to go into server maintainability and security (hackers). OnLive....you guys need to learn from these boys.

7. Microtransactions IYMC! I remember i spoke to people about this already. This on demand is a fancy dancy version of the Korean model seeping into the US market. Play for free, pay to play.

[woodyear99]

Why this thing will fail

1. We are not ready for this yet I think. Both technologically and mentally.
FIRST - OnLive claims a 1.5 MB connection for SD and 5MB for HD. I do not believe this. Their demo's were played for about 3 mins each. We all know lag starts to kick in a little further down the road. And we still have not seen online matchups with 16+ people onscreen.
SECOND - People want a tangible product. Mean they like to have their box in hand. It is slowly dissipating however, with SONY's PSN downloads it is quietly creeping into peoples minds that it doesnt really matter. However you cant just throw someone into this and say "okay go" like OnLive is doing.

2. The "flawless" online gaming is not as flawless as they advertise. Its not a pipedream but its quite ambitious. Essentially when this is RELEASED you can ONLY play in the US. There will ONLY have 3 servers, East, Central and West. And ONLY those areas can play, and play SEPARATELY from each other. East CANNOT link to West. There is too much lag. So just FORGET about Trinidad for now, we are not even considered part of the gaming industry. They will branch out, but that will be later.

3. You dont open a restaurant if you are not the chef. These people make NOTHING. NONE of those titles are exclusive and of all the ones we saw there the ones we want, we already OWN. They are forgetting a key thing, WHY do we own a PS3, 360 or a Wii? It isnt because of just competition, its because we want to play HALO or Killzone or Mario Kart. None of that is offered here, since they are first party systems. We dont need to pay for another service to play the SAME games, with an obviously smaller community. The initial phase of this release is going to be tough on this company.

4. Lack of servers means lack of gamers, meaning dead rooms! Exactly what it says. You are only able to play in the East or West zones, you are only going to have x amount of people with this product..meaning you already have an issue. These people KNOW how to negotiate with their providers, they KNOW how to talk about the download issues. What they DO NOT KNOW is what the community wants and why they want it.

5. Offline? oh sh!t - What you gonna do when you are offline? when you are out somewhere with poor connections or wifi? You cant play a SINGLE damn game that you PAID for.

6 - Powerful servers? Please. I understand and HOPE they know what they are saying. But please dont compare your server PC's to even the BEST friggin home PC's for gaming available. You are talking about a ONE person system vs one for (hopefully) MILLIONS. To add to this these guys can take a dose from Blizzard. With a near 12 MILLION people on WoW you can bet your @SS they know about server maintainability. 250 servers for WoW in the US ALONE dedicated to WoW. They still have downtime (scheduled) with random crashes maybe once a month at the most (not bad atall) that only last about 5 mins. That is a SOLID mc server....12 million x 15 US a month. HALF of that has to go into server maintainability and security (hackers). OnLive....you guys need to learn from these boys.

7. Microtransactions IYMC! I remember i spoke to people about this already. This on demand is a fancy dancy version of the Korean model seeping into the US market. Play for free, pay to play.

I totally agree with this, it may be the eventual route games on consoles go similar to streaming movies/music we have now however this technology may not be ready for prime time right now. 2009 seems a bit ambitious...

[woodyear99]

http://news.vgchartz.com/news.php?id=3329

Editorial: Analysis Of Onlive's Claims On Performance
ShareThis
Posted by: NJ5
03rd Apr 2009, PC, 8,100 views

Onlive has generated a lot of excitement due to its potential impact on the gaming industry. Here we take a close and slightly technical look at performance claims from Onlive's founder and CEO.

If you are an avid reader of gaming news, it's pretty likely you have read a few articles about Onlive. If you haven't, I suggest you take a quick look at articles like this one or this one. In a nutshell, Onlive is an upcoming service which allows for playing games running at a remote server in Onlive's headquarters, with the controller inputs and screen images being streamed through the Internet at 480p-720p resolution and 60 frames per second.

Right from the day the service was announced at GDC 2009, I and many others have had serious doubts that a service like this could really take off in the short/medium-term, mainly due to low speeds and traffic caps of most Internet connections, even when we restrict our attention to developed countries.

Having said that, in this article I am going to skip these general concerns (which are bound to become less important with time) and focus on the concrete claims from Mr. Perlman (the founder of Onlive) in a recent BBC article. The most interesting claim is in this quote:

    "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. "


When I read this tidbit in the article, it was pretty clear that it's at best a highly optimistic claim, perhaps based on a best-case scenario which few gamers can expect to see. Unfortunately, a closer look raises doubts that these response times are possible at all in this day and age. Keep in mind that response time refers to the amount of time it takes from a button press to the on-screen reaction to that button press (for example, the firing of a gun after a fire button is pressed).

In this very interesting article from Gamasutra, a digital camera is used to measure response time of several PS3 and Xbox 360 games with accuracy down to 1/60th of a second. Here are some of their results in milliseconds:
Software    Response time
PS3 System menus    50 ms
Guitar Hero III (Xbox 360)    50 ms
Ninja Gaiden Sigma (PS3)    67 ms
Halo 3 (Xbox 360)    133 - 167 ms
GTA IV (PS3)    167 ms

Comparing this with Mr. Perlman's claims of 35-80 ms response time, this makes Onlive's claimed performance look either exceptional or unbelievable (depending on your perspective). For me, it is very hard to believe that a game running on a local console can have the same or higher response time than achieved with the same game running on a remote computer streamed through an Internet connection from potentially hundreds of kilometers (and several Internet router hops) away.

This is especially true when you notice that the above results are adjusted to discount the effect of a Plasma TV's response time, which by itself is 33 ms according to Gamasutra's research (keeping in mind that TV response time is not the same as the panel's response time, which refers to how long it takes to switch a pixel on after the information has already passed through the TV or monitor's pre-processing circuitry).

If this is not convincing enough or you want a more technical analysis, ask any PC gamer what he/she considers a good "ping time" (network response time) for online play. The standard for good online play is usually a ping time of less than 50 ms, with less than 100 ms being decent enough. However, as the same PC gamer will tell you, ping times vary significantly with time. This is known as jitter, and it must be taken into account in any service running through our unpredictable Internet.

In the specific case of streaming a real-time game through the Internet, if a service like Onlive does not guard against jitter (in other words, if it relies on network response time being constant), the gamer will probably see jerky framerate, meaning video frames will come at irregular intervals.

The solution to the jitter problem is to buffer one or more frames in local memory before they get transferred to the TV. An undesirable side-effect of this buffering is that total response time will increase, since it introduces an additional waiting period before the response image shows up on the screen. If a single frame is buffered in memory (which will guard against some but not all of the jitter), this will introduce one frame of delay, or 17 milliseconds if running at 60 frames per second. Add this to an assumed ping time of 30 (by all standards a very good network response time), and we're already near the 50 ms level, before accounting for any other sources of lag such as the computation of the game logic, physics, video rendering, compression, transfer and decompression or the response time of a typical LCD/Plasma monitor or TV.

Conclusion:

For the time being we should take Mr. Perlman's performance claims with a grain of salt. The claimed performance numbers of < 80 ms response times are at best optimistic given the latency and jitter of today's Internet connections. It is clear that Onlive's engineers have spent a lot of effort in reducing the response time of their system, but there are a lot of factors out of their control.

Nevertheless, there are plenty of reasons to be excited about Onlive if you have a great Internet connection and don't mind the image degradation resulting from the video compression necessary for real-time HD streaming from the Internet. It is expected that Onlive or a similar service will truly take off at some point, but that point seems farther away than Onlive's claims seem to imply.

[TriniXaeno]

excellent read.

definitely skeptical about this, the more I hear about it, the greater the skepticism.

Especially potent is point 3 in shiv's "Why this thing will fail" post.

I bought a Wii to play Zelda and brawl/mario kart online.

Bought a PS2 to play Tekken

Bought a PS3 to play SF4

Why am I going to buy onlive??? (insert killer title here or buss)

[woodyear99]

I guess it will be more for the "I don't have a good pc" crowd? Easier to pay $50 US a month? for a high end gaming service...tho how high end their hardware is, is skeptical

[shivadee]

I am in the beta for this product.....so of course GATT gets the scoop when they start handing beta's out.

[trinigamer]

The death of games consoles – coming soon!

Thu Mar 11 04:21PM by Yahoo! UK Games Editor
Recent articles

    * Sony unveils PlayStation ‘Move’
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    * Yahoo! UK Exclusive Interview: Final Fantasy XIII
    * Girl killed in Wii Remote mix-up
    * Nintendo DSi XL – it’s BIG

A brand new online service promises to serve games to your living rooms, LIVE, and without the need for an expensive console or a high-powered personal computer. It’s the future of gaming and – potentially – the death of traditional gaming devices as we know and love them.

OnLive – say it softly and not within earshot of Sony, Nintendo and co – circumvents the need to trudge to the shops, hand over your hard-earned cash and trudge all the way home again with the latest hot game. Instead, this ‘cloud’ service will deliver top games direct to your PC or TV screen instantly, using a small receiver unit that hooks up to your existing broadband connection.

All the heavy work, so to speak, is performed by powerful remote servers using clever compression routines. Players simply provide the required inputs using a joypad, as normal. The results of their efforts are then streamed back with almost non-existent lag. OnLive will run on a network of server centres placed so that no user is more than 1000 miles from one. In broadband terms that’s just down the road, figuratively speaking.

OnLive is set to launch on 17 June in the USA, with a worldwide rollout expected to follow shortly thereafter. Users will pay a $14.95 (£9.99) subscription fee each month, plus the cost of either buying or renting each game. In this regard OnLive has several very significant advantages: there’s no need to invest any further in a game you’re not enjoying; you can sample all the latest releases with minimal costs; and you’ll be able to remove some of the clutter from under/behind the telly and clear a bit of shelf space into the bargain.

OnLive also enjoys the support of many high-profile games publishers – removing the need to manufacture and physically distribute games is an obvious and lucrative benefit to them. Big-name titles such as Borderlands, Prince of Persia and Assassin’s Creed are among the launch games announced so far. Perhaps understandably, the big three console manufacturers are rather cooler on the whole idea..

http://uk.videogames.games.yahoo.com/blog/article/9173/

[rb]

don't hold your breath on consoles dying anytime soon.

[Redlum08]

Someone already posted about this last year...I believe it may have been either Woodyear or Shivadee...Admins? Merge please....

[Redlum08]

don't hold your breath on consoles dying anytime soon.

Especially since region blocks on IP's outside of the US and Canada area would affect business...At least on consoles you have physical media without a need for high speed internet and actually living in the US or Canada or Europe...etc...so I wouldn't hold my breath either..

[W1nTry]

I'll believe this when I see it, let's face it, the bandwidth required to push HD video and audio is STILL BEYOND the means of MOST of the world, also regardless of how good the compression is, video and audio have always been particuluarly difficult and compression is poor compared to docs and other formats.  This is the case fo voice in the VOIP world and video in the Video conferencing world. I work with WAN connections daily and its amazing how many apps are NOT optimized for low bandwidth (by low I mean NON LAN) speeds. This imho is a pipe dream that is FAR OFF. I WELCOME OPENLY the opportunity to be WRONG, but WHEN it doesn't happen in the next 3 years remember who was the skeptic.

[TriniXaeno]

we have 10mb flow connections that can't even stream youtube vids without stuttering. lol