Tuesday, March 24, 2009

OnLive: Breaking Down More Barriers

If you haven't read anything about OnLive's cloud computing video game service, check out IGN's introduction or the Technology Review's take.

The idea of being able to play any game (or run any workstation) from a PC, a MAC, or just a plain POS is pretty incredible. However, what shocked me more was how close to reality this idea is becoming. International Beta this summer? Live winter of 09? seriously??? Shouldn't there be more barriers? You say it works on DSL??? Just a one megabyte download???? (to put that into perspective, Flash Player 10 is sitting at 1.8MB).

Sorry for all the question marks... but I guess I didn't realize how far we had truly come. If they are streaming HD quality video while reacting to user's input at a near 60fps then we are at the doorstep of interactive TV.

I guess the only question now is, do we call it a TV or a computer? Tomorrow's generation won't know the difference between the two and it can only have one label. Maybe we will create a new label? All I ask is that it doesn't start with a lower case "i" and that it doesn't end with "2.0". Other than that, I am game.

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