Bandwidth caps not a problem for OnLive?

MTV Multiplayer recently conducted an interview with Microsoft, Sony and OnLive’s Steve Perlman in regards to teired internet pricing and bandwidth caps.  The overall consensus is that bandwidth caps will not be a problem for games.  Sony claims that playing a game online over PSN will require at most 55MB/hour.  That is an almost inconsequential number.

According to the article, OnLive will typically use a comparatively gargantuan 950MB/hour for HD gaming and 350MB/hour for SD gaming.  With Comcast’s 250GB cap, that equals out to 250 hours of gaming a month or over 8 hours a day.  This sounds like plenty, but when you consider that Time Warner’s new policy limits users to 60GB a month, that equals out to 2 hours a day of HD gaming.  This makes things quite a bit tighter for normal users, especially when these numbers don’t account for any other internet use within the cap.

Steve Perlman doesn’t seem worried about this though.  “Bandwidth caps will be bumped into by conventional movie/TV viewing WAY before we start seeing OnLive users bumping into them. And, no doubt users who exceed a minuscule 5GB monthly budget downloading one movie from Netflix, Amazon or iTunes, or who find themselves spending $200/month on broadband usage fees for 7 hours of TV viewing on YouTube or Hulu will (a) be rather incensed and (b) likely switch to an alternate broadband carrier. It will be a very long time before OnLive comes anywhere near the broadband penetration of YouTube, Hulu, iTunes, Amazon, mtv, abc/nbc/cbs/fox/hbo.com, etc., if ever. So, we won’t be the ones testing this issue.”

With many people switching over to pure internet-based solutions for their TV needs, these usage caps are going to quickly catch-up with them.  Seeing how OnLive will gobble bandwidth in a way that other gaming services do not, its users may have to deal with these Interenet Service Provider issues sooner than everyone else.

[Via MTV Multiplayer]