Digital Home Thoughts: A Peek into the OnLive Beta

"Well, obviously looking for answers, I found a login for the closed OnLive beta and decided to sit down for a couple of weeks and give the service a thorough evaluation. In this article we'll look at both the ease of use of the service as well as the real-world experience of playing a few of the games. I think you will find the results to be interesting!"

The preview by PC Perspective does cover a lot of the concerns that have been talked about regarding OnLive, though I think they downplay the fact that they were testing in a set up that was not approved and even advised against. A fair preview of the service should be done from what OnLive considers a typical setup. That being said, the whole OnLive concept brings about bigger issues which relate to cloud computing, since that is pretty much what OnLive is. Powerful hardware, and to an extent, platform dependencies are becoming less of an issue thanks to efforts from cloud computing. This might sound good, but there are potential downsides as consumers. Instead of a single investment, you are looking at a continual cost. Privacy and security concerns become much more important. And there is also the issue of vendor lock down. Say a competitor to OnLive were to be launched, how easy would it be for you to transfer all your save games and other information?