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I don't see this going anywhere, really.
Remember that 250 gig monthly limit on Comcast?
Add HD game video streaming to your regular bandwidth consumption, and I can see people easily hitting that limit.
And then there are the other connection-related problems, such as when yours goes down, and how much lag it takes to make it unusable.
Judging from their architecture, it looks like it will be PC games only, and if it's equivalent to some massive gaming rig, that means they have to have that hardware on their end, and the money for it has to come from somewhere.
Even if they can manage 4 games running simultaneously on one server, the cost per user is still going to be 1/4th of the bill of the machine, PLUS bandwidth, PLUS that little box that plugs into your TV, PLUS their cut.
And that works out to way more than a console.

Some of their friends and spectating stuff does sound pretty cool, but really, XBL and PSN could be adapted to support all of that.

What is this Comcast I keep hearing about?

Watch the whole video when you get a chance. Yeah, it's about an hour long, but it answers a lot of questions.

I kept saying to myself "this looks too good to be true, but please God let it be true". And "in a certain way" I'd be able to say that the best gaming platform ever came from Apple.

I started smiling when they said, early on the video: "when WE created Quicktime" and "when we created the first color Mac", and later when they showed it running on a Mac (was that a MacBook Air?).

ukimalefu wrote:

Hands-On Impressions

It sounds like it works alright, as long as you live in SoCal and are 1 of 10 people playing at once.
He said they were 50 miles from the server, but how much worse will the latency get when that goes up to 500 or 1000 miles and 5 hops on your traceroute to 20?
And I still don't see any way for them to roll this out on a larger scale with more users; it'll just get MORE expensive, not less.

ukimalefu wrote:

Watch the whole video when you get a chance. Yeah, it's about an hour long, but it answers a lot of questions.

I kept saying to myself "this looks too good to be true, but please God let it be true". And "in a certain way" I'd be able to say that the best gaming platform ever came from Apple.

Not unless you and Sci come outen your closets and defend Mac gaming in That Other Thread You're Avoiding. Otherwise Rob wins thru lack of loyal platform defenders and he becomes William F. Buckley, in the vein of "Resolved: The Mac is a Lousy Gaming Platform."

ukimalefu wrote:

Earendil the Mariner wrote:

[..]

It's pre-beta now.

Sign up for the beta an tell us how it goes.

http://www.onlive.com/beta_program.html

Isn't that your job?

A job for Kirk!

ukimalefu wrote:

I started smiling when they said, early on the video: "when WE created Quicktime" and "when we created the first color Mac", and later when they showed it running on a Mac (was that a MacBook Air?).

OnLive is boasting having already secured itself deals with 10 major players in the game industry, including Electronic Arts, Ubisoft, Take Two, and THQ. The firm's founder and CEO, Steve Perlman, reckons the system will work out "significantly" cheaper than buying a console.

Perlman, who helped launch WebTV - which was snapped up by Microsoft in 1997 - also said the service would be subscription based and would likely launch by the end of 2009.

OnLive's service seems remarkably similar to everything we've heard about AMD's upcoming Fusion Render Cloud, which also proposes the streaming of games and HD content to thin clients. AMD must be hoping OnLive doesn't fog up its plans. µ

Well, it must work. It has the expertise of WebTV behind it!

http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/new … s-obsolete

If Perlman was such a Machead, why'd he sell to MS?

"When WE created Quicktime... we sold it to the highest bidder. Well, OK- the first bidder. Who're we fooling?"