OnLive - Games On Demand Service Announced

At the currently ongoing 2009 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, a new company called OnLive introduced itself to the gaming world with a bold claim. Based in Palo Alto, California, OnLive, the name of both the company and its on demand online gaming platform, is presenting a games on demand service, promising to instantly deliver the latest high-end titles over home broadband Internet to the TV and entry-level PCs and Macs. In it's current development state, OnLive is supposed to deliver fullscreen gaming action at a resolution of up to 1280 x 720 at 60 fps - if you do have a 5Mbps connection. The slower your connection, the smaller the resolution gets, of course.

According to OnLive's CEO, Steve Perlman, this new technology was being developed and worked on for seven years already and is paying tribute to the wide availability of consumer broadband connectivity and the shift to cloud computing in general. Perlman states that their new video compression algorithm only takes one millisecond of lag to encode the video.

This is the main idea behind OnLive:

• Connect to OnLive with your TV, PC or Mac (either directly or with their MicroConsole) and start a game
• Your game runs in a state-of-the-art OnLive game server center
• OnLive connects you to game servers through the Internet, instantly sending your controller actions upstream and the results back downstream at blinding fast speeds
• Enjoy ultra high-performance gameplay on your TV or entry-level PC or Mac

So far, nine prominent game publishers already announced that they are going to actively support OnLive: Atari, Codemasters, Eidos, Electronic Arts, Epic, Take Two, THQ, Ubisoft, and Warner Bros.

The official, public launch of this service is scheduled for winter 2009 and a beta for summer 2009. So, keep your eyes open for updates on this interesting new service...