Daniel Myers

Onlive
Ok, I am going to jump on this one too as it is interesting and it is creating a fair amount of media buzz surrounding it. First of all I think it is a neat idea with some fascinating prospects around it. There is a lot of flexibility with the system and some possibilities game wise that may not have/could not have fully been explored before.
The technology as it is contrary to what everyone has been saying is not that new. Actually very similar things have been up and running for a long time in the form of Remote Desktop however remote desktop never was fully geared for gaming on the remote connected machine by even one connection. Even though people tried with mixed levels of success. So onlive has made changes to the remote desktop idea and is gearing it specifically for games. And instead of connecting and having full control over a system somewhere they have made it so that a player connects to a cloud and simply plays the game. The management of the games is all done by onlive and the player simply has to connect and play.
I am extremely curious to the networking aspect though. There are only so many things that can be done to reduce latency across network connections and a lot of areas of consideration in between. For instance, a ping packet is a relatively small packet of information that gets echoed by a another computer somewhere, and even on a local network there is a specific amount of time this packet takes to reach the destination computer and be returned. Now Onlive is talking about streaming video from a game and taking player input across a wide area network where in the better case scenarios there would be about a .1 (100ms) delay between sending the command and receiving the result. That is figuring about a 50ms latency between your system and theirs. The real question would be how the system handles latency in excess of 500ms.
This is all fine and well, they likely have done everything that they can to optimize the whole system. My concerns more lie on the side of what things they have done to handle the scenarios where the network isn't running as optimally as they hope. Including time periods where there might be usage surges on their equipment like when a hot new title is released and everyone is rushing to get on and play it. Another question would be how well does like cable connections from comcast would hold up to two of these running at the same time on the same network connection. Another scenario would be if I wanted to pick up and go over to a friends house with the tvbox in tow how well would that work. I get this feeling that it really is being catered to a single gamer in the household with little on how well multiple of these connections would hold up in a house that has more than one gamer. Especially with the current connection requirements for standard/hd being 1.5mbps and 5mbps respectively. So if you were to take this over to your friends to have a mini lan party and they only have a 10mbps cable modem you would be really stressing their connection with two hd connections. And that still isn't accounting for any of the other possible network issues that might come about while doing that.
Now there is plenty of technological hurdles, and customer hurdles for a system like this to really take off. It does offer some unique possibilities for game developers that haven't really been seen before. Not just what everyone else has talked about i.e. software piracy and not having to wait for releases in lines at the store etc. There are other interesting prospects like really large scale games that have even more system requirements than what a household could possibly handle on their own systems networked together. What I mean is the games are running in a cloud of servers, and there are significantly more resources at the games disposal. Who says a game can't be written to use more of those resources for like AI processing or for more expansive level designs.
Honestly I have preferred digital downloads for software to actually having the discs for a long time now. So long as I am able to download it again if it gets trashed on my computer. So Onlive's method of holding the games doesn't bother me really at all. This particular method is actually not a bad way of doing it, you don't have to worry about patching your game to be able to run it, or install the game. Plus it alleviates some of the platform issues without requiring the developers to rewrite code to make it work on the different platforms. I see this as incredibly beneficial as then the game offerings that can be played on a Mac goes up significantly. Plus I can opt to play these games on a tv with their tv box if I wanted to.
All things considering, I really am excited to see this in action and see how it does. I don't think that it will upset the console makers initially or even for a while. Honestly there really is no way to determine right now how well it does other than the general excitement it has been eliciting across the internet and media. I think that there is a good possibility that it would be an awesome system and I would be more than willing to try it out/purchase one when they are made available. And can't forget, it is Shiny!