Digital Home Thoughts - News & Reviews for the Digital Home

"The number was reached after what MS is calling "the biggest year" in Xbox history - 2008 - which saw console growth swell up 28 percent. The Xbox Live community has grown to more than 20 million active members, it says, making it "the world's largest global entertainment network", putting the online service in more homes than "any satellite television provider". Before the end of the year, the number of Xbox Live members will surpass the number of subscribers to the largest cable provider, the company says."

There's no doubting that the Xbox 360 is one of Microsoft's most successful products in a market that was previously thought of as being "un-crackable" because the PS/2 had it all locked up. Then along came Microsoft, and Nintendo, and the market turned into a three-way death match. It's all good for consumers, giving us the choice of whichever technology suits us best. I'm still rocking my original Xbox 360 from November 2005 (man, that seems old!), with nary a red ring of death in sight. I sometimes wish it would die so I could get one of the newer, quieter, HDMI-based units - but it keeps on kicking.

"While OnLive's backend servers do the heavy crunching, pretty much any PC or Mac has the power to decompress the video at what's perceived to be real-time. As Steve puts it, "video is trivial for us now." The demo starts at about 10 minutes into the video and looks damn impressive running on a Dell Studio 15 (16 minutes in) -- yes, it runs Crysis. Controlled yes, but very, very promising. See for yourself in the video after the break."

It was bound to happen. With a lot of things in the consumer market shifting towards "cloud computing", an attempt at cloud gaming was inevitable. OnLive has been in development for 7 years, and I have to admit that a lot of what they've done makes sense. If you can provide a terminal that accesses high performance machines somewhere on the Internet to play games, why not? Like any other hosted service, it gets updated automatically, you get access to a large library of games, it runs on high performance hardware and it is self-maintaining. Still, unlike most other hosted applications, gaming is a slave to latency or more specifically response time. I'm very skeptical of OnLive being able to provide a consistent quality of service that's got high resolution, pretty graphics and a fast response time. I'm biased because I still live in a world where Internet access is still relatively pokey. Even assuming they're able to find a market, or have the technology to scale graphics depending on your internet connection, the other big hurdle they'll need to overcome is the concept of people enjoying the concept of actually "owning" their games. What about you? Would you prefer to own all your games, or would you be willing to live with what amounts to a rental service?