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]

David Perry, founder of Shiny Entertainment and creator of Earthworm Jim, MDK, Messiah , Wild 9 and Enter the Matrix, has come out saying he has been in the development stages of creating his own streaming game service titled Gaikai.  The name may or may not be derived from the Japanese word for ocean or physical world.  Could this be a battle beween OnLive’s cloud and Perry’s ocean?

Perry has a lot to say about the prospect of OnLive and insists, although self-admittedly, that his solution is better.  It is common knowledge that to play OnLive on your computer you will need to download a 1MB file to your browser.  Perry claims his solution requires no such download and can therefore be played anywhere.  This includes work and school environments where no extra software installations are permitted.

The features of his service sound ideal, but without any real showing of his technology, it’s hard to know where this really lies between concept and fruition.  If we have seen anything, it is that this technology takes a long time to build up and it doesn’t stop there, the platform is just as important.

Xbox 360 would not be where it is today without Xbox Live and OnLive seems to have some sort of equivalent with its social-centric Arena and Brag Clips elements.  Streamlining the front-end experience has been a focus for both OnLive and Gaikai, but the back-end network features will really need to be taken care of as well if any of these companies want to make a splash with serious gamers.

[Via GamesIndustry.biz]

Way back on October 31st, 2007, VentureBeat reported that OnLive Inc. (note: the name OnLive was being used as early as 2007) received $16.5M worth of venture Capital money from backers including Maverick Capital and Warner Brothers.

The fact that WB funded them is especially intriguing when you consider the widely accepted notion that if Rearden Studios’ technology works how it is supposed to, it will have an impact far beyond gaming.  While Warner Brothers does have a gaming division, it is of course more of a media company.  Does this possibly hint at a future interest in OnLive as more than a gaming platform?  It seems likely.

This is some of the first concrete evidence we have linking OnLive to potential partner companies outside of the gaming space.

[Via VentureBeat]

Over at Gamindustry.biz Crytek, the developers of Crysis, had a few things to say about the streaming technology behind OnLive, not the lest of which being that it will not be workable until 2013 at the earliest.  That is a good 4 years away.  Does Rearden Studios know something that they don’t?  “We had our research in 2005 on this subject but we stopped around 2007 because we had doubts about economics of scale. But that was at a time when bandwidth was more expensive,” says CEO Cevat Yerli.He went on to say “We saw that by 2013 – 2015 with the development of bandwidths and household connections worldwide that it might become more viable then.”

“It doesn’t take a lot to make a video-based renderer, but what you need is the right infrastructure that is beyond the technology we have, it’s more like cable net providers and communication networks.  They have to provide fast bandwidths and connectivity in order to allow such technology to excel. So as it was dependent on somebody else, we decided to wait.”  This doesn’t exactly sound like a ringing endorsement.  He went onto say “We’re not involved, we just allowed Crysis to be tested on it.”

Everyone’s stance seems to be the same, it’s just too early for this kind of technology.  Although the promised 720p 60fps claim seems somewhat optimistic, maybe if the focus was moved to more Wii-level 480p 3ofps gaming it could still be a good start to gradually building-out the infrastructure.

[Via GamesIndustry.biz]

With the announcement on Tuesday you would think that the video of the presentation would be widely available, but GameSpot seems to be the only place to find it.  You can find the video embedded after the jump.

Update: 3/28: Switched to Youtube version

[Via GameSpot]

Click through for audio/video →

On Tuesday the 24th, Rearden Studios announced their new internet streaming gaming service OnLive at the Game Developers Conference.  According to them this is using a combination of hardware and software streaming technologies that have been 7 years in development.  The announcement struck everyone in the gaming industry by surprise.  One thing that can be said for sure about Rearden Studios is that they know how to keep a secret.

The system is built on streaming player input to a server bank and from there relaying back the player movement through HD streaming video. The calculations and transfer are handled by high powered server banks with very low latency at a claimed 1 millisecond.  The whole concept sounds somewhat suspect until you hear who the people behind it are.  Steve Perlman (founder & CEO) formerly worked at Apple and was part of the team that developed Quicktime in the mid ’90s and Mike McGarvey (COO) is a former CEO of Eidos.

It gets even more interesting in that the streaming can be done on any PC, Mac or through a proprietary “miniconsole” which will be launched with the service this Winter.  The “miniconsole” is said to be priced at “less than a Wii” and possibly free with a subscription service of some sort of which details will be released later.

They are offering sign-ups for the beta that is to be taking place this summer at their site.