High Quality streaming games to your TV?

[T-Bone]

Just came acrosss this article while browising on the BBC News this morning.

I find this interesting? If this really works like they say it does could it be the end of gamers being alienated for not owning top quality hardware? Willl it make gaming more available to the masses and will it even work at all?

What do you guys think?

 

[SgtFury]

Lol damn you was just about to post this myself, you beat me by 5 mins....

Like the guy says down the bottom it will probably depend on their business model... how much they charge per mb per box etc. But it does look intriguing.

 

[thatbloke]

so the idea is that they do the hard work and stream it to your PC over the net.

That's fine, as long as you are playing chess or something.

With current internet speeds available in the UK and the speed (or lack, thereof) that this infrastructure is being upgraded this will never get going as you will need a very fat pipe for playing something like an FPS at standards that we are used to seeing at the moment.

For slower paced games, I can see this working. But for things like FPS's which are the mainstay of many a tournament, I can't see it working particularly well at this time.

Not that it isn't a good idea though......

The other way this could work is that for homes with multiple PCs, you could buy a high-end server that would run these kind of apps and then you stream it across your network and play that way instead of needing to use the net...

(PS: I read about this in slashdot yesterday so NER)

 

[elDiablo]

I doubt it will (currently) beat playing on a local machine. I have concerns that the latency between your input and the onscreen results will be too large, and make you feel disconnected from the game. It's horrible when it happens. I mean, when you see someone in a multiplayer game, that you KNOW you are hitting with bullets, but the latency is just slightly too high, and he is really infront of where you are aiming. Now imagine that, but with just running around. And not only in multiplayer games, but single player as well.

Also, consoles haven't destroyed the PC gaming market. People still buy PCs, and spend lots of money on them to make them super powerful, and just how they want. It's one thing the consoles will never have over the PCs (in their current business model). But I can see OnLive competing with consoles.

Though streaming video has a high bandwidth requirement, and a lot of ISPs have "fair usage" of around 40Gb/month. And if people start playing 4+ hours a day of "high quality" video (even if it is compressed) for a whole month, that's what? Upwards of 120 hours a month of video. Say 2 hours is 700Meg, we'll say 500 for ease of calculation, that's 30,000Meg, which we'll say is 30Gigs. That's getting awful close to the fair usage. What if they use BBC iPlayer as well? Hell, ISPs complain about BBC iPlayer taking too much bandwidth as it is...

SO! Random mumbles aside, I wouldn't pay a big monthly fee for this if I had to pay extra on my internet because I was breaking my fair usage policy. And if everyone in your street is playing at the same time (aka, evenings), then bandwidth on ADSL will drop, QoS drops, etc. And latency is a killer! If it turns out to be cheaper than buying the games, then maybe. But I'm not sure how it can be in the long term... Charge per megabyte, charge per hour, charge monthly fee, charge per game "rental"? All have their down sides for the consumer, if you ask me...

Edit - DAMN YOU BLOKE!

 

[Traxata]

It's interesting, but as the other's have already said, latency will be an issue, or they'll have to lower the graphics to have any competition....



Also T-bone.

I find this interesting?

Why is that a question?

 

[PsiSoldier]

Why is that a question?

itz kool to make statmentz into kwestyuns.

 

[thatbloke]

Eurogamer have summed up my feelings about this pretty well.

While I don't think that what they intend to achieve isn't possible in the future, with technology as it is currently and various media companies doing their best to eke out every single penny they can from age old business models that are just not appropriate for the digital age I can't see this happening in the mainstream for real for another 15-20 years or so...

 

[thatbloke]

Ctrl+Alt+Del have also summed up OnLive pretty well too

 

[Wol]

So instead of me having a nice graphics card in my dekstop, I'd not need one, and then other datacentres would run games....?

What about other games which arent available at the magical datacentres? I'll still need a nice graphics card to play those surely, thus defeating the point overall. Streaming beautiful 1920*1200 over a network at an acceptable enough framerate, with no latency (current streaming video usually buffers a fair chunk), for me to play games.... don't think so somehow until the internet gets much better! I can barely stream low quality highly compressed 720p video from uni to my home without it still falling over....

/wol has either missed something or is highly dubious.....