Digital Home Thoughts - News & Reviews for the Digital Home

"The OnLive MicroConsole is one way to get your streaming game fix, but here comes Vizio with four more -- the bargain television company just revealed that those brand-new VIA Plus HDTVs and Blu-ray players (as well as that VIA Tablet and VIA Phone) will come with OnLive on board."

TVs have been gaining features year by year. Instead of just playing video, they now also display pictures, stream Internet video, handle apps and now, offer gaming. Why bother with an XBox or PS3 when you have all that you need in your TV? No hassle with cables or discs, just a subscription you pay each month, like NetFlix, and you have access to a host of games. Sure, that might not appeal to the more serious gamer, but for casual games or non-nano-second critical games, OnLive seems to fit the bill for a lot of people. While starting with VIA is a good start, OnLive will need to sign a few more brands to be successful. Of course, Microsoft or Sony could always begin offering their own integrated TVs or Cable boxes. It almost makes me frustrated though, since it seems like TV manufacturers are acting more like video card companies these days, offering new features each year to tempt you to upgrade.

"Such a model may turn the gaming hardware industry on its head, but it opens up new avenues of utility for tablets, mobile phones, and even that 5- or 6-year-old computer that would have otherwise been hopelessly unable to run most modern-day titles."

I sincerely doubt that any of these streaming services will spell the end of traditional console gaming. It will definitely take some of the market share away, and the consoles may become a two party system, but the biggest issue with regards to any of these services is the dependence on a persistent Internet connection. There are other concerns like latency and image quality, but I imagine that despite all of these issues, Internet providers and game publishers are dying for such a solution. It not only makes it mandatory for an Internet connection, and a beefy one at that, but it helps trap you into a service, not a product. With that service comes the threat of losing all your games and saves should you no longer pay their fee.

"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?

"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?