Wolfire games blog entry about OnLive

[Svartalf]

For single-player FPS games it will be alright I guess (and if the servers are directly in the local datacenters of your internet provider, than it will scale without much trouble).

Oh, so do you think OC-12's lie around with most ISPs?

An OC-12 is the minimum practical level being able to support 3-6k subscribers simultaneously with their SD levels of resolution. (You're actually probably going to need an OC-48 or an OC-192 to do it right- an OC-12 is overselling things pretty badly actually...)

Expense of an OC-12 setup is $100-300K for stable hardware and the link.

Ongoing expenses will be something on the order of 2k/month.

That's COST. Regardless of it being the ISP doing it. And the big-boys are bitching about bandwidth hungry stuff already and wanting to charge everyone more for it, users and providers alike.

This is DRM snake oil that's being peddled to investors and the publishers. The expenses of doing this the right way so that it'd work is astronomical. Bandwidth and the latency that comes from not having enough thereof will kill this idea deader than a doornail.

[Julius]

Well I might not know the technical details, but if the servers running the onlive stuff are located right in the local data centers (say in the part of the city you live in) than they simply don't need such a big transfer capacity as it can be distributed directly to a smaller amount of users.

Except for the latency issues a system like Onlive basically already exists here in Germany, where the largest DSL provider offers on fast demand HD movie streaming, for a pice cheaper than what Onlive asks for.

But as I said I am not so much an technical expert so I might be wrong

[Svartalf]

Well I might not know the technical details, but if the servers running the onlive stuff are located right in the local data centers (say in the part of the city you live in) than they simply don't need such a big transfer capacity as it can be distributed directly to a smaller amount of users.

Except for the latency issues a system like Onlive basically already exists here in Germany, where the largest DSL provider offers on fast demand HD movie streaming, for a pice cheaper than what Onlive asks for.

But as I said I am not so much an technical expert so I might be wrong

If you're not a technical expert, perhaps you should refrain from discussing things of this nature.

Bandwidth is bandwidth- doesn't matter if it's in the ISP or in the backbones. The additive amounts if you don't oversell the capacity is actually much larger. You'll need an OC-192's worth of bandwidth (10Gbits/sec...) to service 6000 users within a geographic area.

I will state for the record that my day job happens to be developing the platform software that network traffic monitoring (as in call volume, call tracing, etc...) software is built upon for Tektronix Communications Group. I make stuff used by companies like AT&T Mobile, Telstra, etc.

When I say that you're going to be crushed by this stuff...I'm not kidding.

[alexan]

Now days game are already developed with cloud computing: this is "menacing" as our way to view it nowdays. But this (that probably will become the standard of tomorrow) could bring opt-out possibilities for opensource: I hope skilled OSS engineers will use this technology to bring back the propriety of this stuff in the user's hands.