HTC believes in OnLive

[ChristofferC]

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13506_3-20030961-17.html

February 8, 2011 5:35 AM PST
Report: HTC invests $40 million in OnLive
by Don Reisinger

HTC is looking to expand its ability to offer smartphone users multimedia content.

The smartphone maker has invested $40 million in cloud-gaming service OnLive, The Wall Street Journal is reporting. Citing an HTC spokeswoman, the newspaper said that HTC's investment in OnLive will be used to help it deliver more games to players on smartphones. All told, HTC will purchase 5.3 million OnLive shares for $7.50 per share, according to the report.

OnLive currently delivers video games to PCs and Macs over the Web. The company also sells the OnLive MicroConsole, which connects to a user's television and lets them play titles through the service. OnLive offers the ability to rent or purchase games, or subscribe for $9.99 per month for unlimited access to its library of titles.

HTC and OnLive aren't really an odd couple.

Last month, OnLive announced plans to integrate its service into Vizio's upcoming HDTVs, Blu-ray players, smartphones, and tablets. The company also offers the OnLive Viewer in the App Store for Apple iPad users to see how its service works, but not actually play games. The company said at the time that the app will offer "full game play capability" at some point in the future.

HTC's decision to capitalize on OnLive's mobile focus might be a good idea. Mobile gaming is growing considerably.

In a study last year, market research firm Gartner revealed that the mobile gaming space is set for huge revenue explosion in the next few years. The firm estimated that total mobile gaming revenue around the world would reach $5.6 billion in 2010, and climb to $11.4 billion in 2014. Gartner estimated at the time that a hefty 70 percent to 80 percent of all applications downloaded to mobile platforms were games.

Gaming isn't the only thing on HTC's agenda this week. The company announced yesterday that it had made a "strategic investment" in London-based digital-multimedia provider Saffron Digital, which offers video on demand and other mobile-facing multimedia services to vendors. It partners with Samsung in the U.S., HTC said.

HTC did not release the terms of its deal with Saffron Digital, but The Wall Street Journal is reporting that it was valued at $48.6 million.

This is awesome news for the future of OnLive!

 

[MetalCraze]

HTC invests $40 million in OnLive

Actually OnLive is a pretty good hoax.

Promise publishers the unbeatable DRM and total accessibility to the customer so any moron will be able to have it at home - then quickly throw together a few servers that provide laggy games with the image and sound quality worse than that of YouTube and lowest graphical settings - then open pockets wide for publisher millions.

I wonder when the next phase will come - the court-"gimme back mah moneys" one.

 

[Xor]

I'd love to see them overcome the physical bandwidth limitations and inconsistent connections of the mobile phone world.

Whenever I ask how OnLive is supposed to overcome physical limits like latency and bandwidth, OnLive fanboys generally either don't respond or just give some kind of general statement. "It just does! It's powered by magic!"

 

[.Sigurd]

I'd love to see them overcome the physical bandwidth limitations and inconsistent connections of the mobile phone world.

Whenever I ask how OnLive is supposed to overcome physical limits like latency and bandwidth, OnLive fanboys generally either don't respond or just give some kind of general statement. "It just does! It's powered by magic!"

I played it and I live in Brazil. The only thing I needed was a 7mb/s internet connection. It works but the only problem is that the video quality is the same of a Youtube 360~480p video. Doesn't worth it.

 

[shihonage]

OnLive will survive because of its Netflix-competing notions.

The gaming gimmick will fade into background and movies will come into foreground, all the while using their compression technology which, I suspect, is superior to other movie-streaming competitors in the field.

If they can squeeze in better video with less bandwidth, combined with all these ISP bandwidth caps, they just may end up becoming a monster that topples Netflix.

 

[MetalCraze]

Hah? Have you seen how 720p looks on YouTube these days? There's next to no difference with what you can see in your MKV compressed HD and I'm on ADSL.

I doubt OnLive will do better for movies. Also shitty 360p, all while running games at lowest possible settings and even then - upscaling the resolution, isn't what I call "superior".

 

[Destroid]

Hah? Have you seen how 720p looks on YouTube these days? There's next to no difference with what you can see in your MKV compressed HD and I'm on ADSL.

I doubt OnLive will do better for movies. Also shitty 360p, all while running games at lowest possible settings and even then - upscaling the resolution, isn't what I call "superior".

That's a bit ass, shouldn't they be running on high settings but low resolution - because server side processing power is the one thing they should have an excess of.

 

[Fowyr]

In before Xi. Oh wait, he was scared for liveOnLive.

 

[Overweight Manatee]

OnLive will survive because of its Netflix-competing notions.

The gaming gimmick will fade into background and movies will come into foreground, all the while using their compression technology which, I suspect, is superior to other movie-streaming competitors in the field.

If they can squeeze in better video with less bandwidth, combined with all these ISP bandwidth caps, they just may end up becoming a monster that topples Netflix.

Compression doesn't work that way. There are tradeoffs everywhere. To minimize the input latency Onlive has to have a compression algorithm that sacrifices image quality and lower size for being able to compress a frame and send it over the intertubes 30 times a second. Netflix streaming movies can use whatever fancy algorithm they like that takes a supercomputer a week to compress, and by sacrificing the extra computational power to do so they have higher image quality and/or lower bandwidth usage. The same is true for the other end, Onlive needs an algorithm that decompresses instantly while movies can easily have their output buffered by a few seconds in exchange for a large increase in the complexity of the compression algorithm used and a corresponding decrease in the size needed to send the frames.

Hah? Have you seen how 720p looks on YouTube these days? There's next to no difference with what you can see in your MKV compressed HD and I'm on ADSL.

I doubt OnLive will do better for movies. Also shitty 360p, all while running games at lowest possible settings and even then - upscaling the resolution, isn't what I call "superior".

That's a bit ass, shouldn't they be running on high settings but low resolution - because server side processing power is the one thing they should have an excess of.

For $10 a month? What kind of hardware that can run high settings do you think you can afford with that, considering how much of that $10 goes to paying for everything else Onlive uses? Nevermind that with the amount of compression artifacts it has any increase in settings would be unnoticeable with all of the shit on the screen.

 

[Angthoron]

To be honest, this OnLive shit could actually find itself used in mobile phone gaming. Only problem is, to be able to even use it, you'd probably need to have a pretty damn expensive net connection to begin with, not to mention that the battery load would seriously limit the whole gaming thing. If someone were to go so far just to play the games, $10 platform fee would be peanuts.

Then again, this is still a stupid pointless shitty idea.

 

[Destroid]

OnLive will survive because of its Netflix-competing notions.

The gaming gimmick will fade into background and movies will come into foreground, all the while using their compression technology which, I suspect, is superior to other movie-streaming competitors in the field.

If they can squeeze in better video with less bandwidth, combined with all these ISP bandwidth caps, they just may end up becoming a monster that topples Netflix.

Compression doesn't work that way. There are tradeoffs everywhere. To minimize the input latency Onlive has to have a compression algorithm that sacrifices image quality and lower size for being able to compress a frame and send it over the intertubes 30 times a second. Netflix streaming movies can use whatever fancy algorithm they like that takes a supercomputer a week to compress, and by sacrificing the extra computational power to do so they have higher image quality and/or lower bandwidth usage. The same is true for the other end, Onlive needs an algorithm that decompresses instantly while movies can easily have their output buffered by a few seconds in exchange for a large increase in the complexity of the compression algorithm used and a corresponding decrease in the size needed to send the frames.

Hah? Have you seen how 720p looks on YouTube these days? There's next to no difference with what you can see in your MKV compressed HD and I'm on ADSL.

I doubt OnLive will do better for movies. Also shitty 360p, all while running games at lowest possible settings and even then - upscaling the resolution, isn't what I call "superior".

That's a bit ass, shouldn't they be running on high settings but low resolution - because server side processing power is the one thing they should have an excess of.

For $10 a month? What kind of hardware that can run high settings do you think you can afford with that, considering how much of that $10 goes to paying for everything else Onlive uses? Nevermind that with the amount of compression artifacts it has any increase in settings would be unnoticeable with all of the shit on the screen.

Defeats the point then really doesn't it - the only reason to use streaming is for teh grafix, but streaming can't handle teh grafix so why are we doing this again?

 

[baronjohn]

Hah? Have you seen how 720p looks on YouTube these days? There's next to no difference with what you can see in your MKV compressed HD and I'm on ADSL.

Youtube 720p looks like shit compared to a proper 720p BRrip.

 

[SCO]

I predict that only non-interactive games (ie: not twitch) will be usable in this shit.

Return of the Turnbased?

The reason they're doing it obvious: resellers and piracy and preventing competition.

 

[shihonage]

Compression doesn't work that way. There are tradeoffs everywhere. To minimize the input latency Onlive has to have a compression algorithm that sacrifices image quality and lower size for being able to compress a frame and send it over the intertubes 30 times a second. Netflix streaming movies can use whatever fancy algorithm they like that takes a supercomputer a week to compress, and by sacrificing the extra computational power to do so they have higher image quality and/or lower bandwidth usage. The same is true for the other end, Onlive needs an algorithm that decompresses instantly while movies can easily have their output buffered by a few seconds in exchange for a large increase in the complexity of the compression algorithm used and a corresponding decrease in the size needed to send the frames.

This is based on the assumption that Netflix are technically savvy and are not lazy fucks like the rest of the video streaming players and formats out there.

The fact that OnLive can be embedded in hardware, alone, suggests that it may have the ability to decompress and deartifact better than your average Flash craplayer. As for sacrificing encoding for video quality, it's not a big deal to adjust it on their end, as long as the platform, on which it runs, is optimized to all hell, which it likely is.

 

[Luigi]

Their hardware unit is fpga or even something dedicated.
Decode is done on hardware. Not an issue.

Bandwidth and price are.

Although on mobile you dont have that luxury. And decode would chew through the battery like that!

 

[AdmiralHugbunny]

This is based on the assumption that Netflix are technically savvy and are not lazy fucks like the rest of the video streaming players and formats out there.

The fact that OnLive can be embedded in hardware, alone, suggests that it may have the ability to decompress and deartifact better than your average Flash craplayer. As for sacrificing encoding for video quality, it's not a big deal to adjust it on their end, as long as the platform, on which it runs, is optimized to all hell, which it likely is.

I'm not sure what "OnLive can be embedded in hardware" means. Everything can be embedded in hardware. Maybe you meant to say "can be implemented in hardware alone". Still, it doesn't mean anything.

It's most likely that OnLive, from the client's perspective, consists of a login/authentication protocol and decoding of a certain audio/video codec. I'm not sure what advantage of OnLive's you're referring to here.

H.264 can be implemented in hardware and for that matter, so can BitTorrent.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2084478,00.asp

 

[Destroid]

Can't any code be implemented in hardware? Isn't that just another way of saying that you are using specialised circuitry instead of general purpose chips?

 

[AdmiralHugbunny]

Anything CAN be implemented in hardware, but not every piece of logic benefits from or is easy to implement purely in hardware.

Video decoding is very popular these days and nearly all smartphones are able to perform this, usually using dedicated chips (same goes for voice encoding/decoding for phone calls).

 

[MetalCraze]

The fact that OnLive can be embedded in hardware, alone, suggests that it may have the ability to decompress and deartifact better than your average Flash craplayer. As for sacrificing encoding for video quality, it's not a big deal to adjust it on their end, as long as the platform, on which it runs, is optimized to all hell, which it likely is.

Really? So far all we have seen is a very shitty quality, worse than that of youtube 360p

The whole idea of not buying new hardware to run new games is in ashes because they look there worse than what we had 7 years ago.

 

[Xor]

To be honest, this OnLive shit could actually find itself used in mobile phone gaming. Only problem is, to be able to even use it, you'd probably need to have a pretty damn expensive net connection to begin with, not to mention that the battery load would seriously limit the whole gaming thing. If someone were to go so far just to play the games, $10 platform fee would be peanuts.

Then again, this is still a stupid pointless shitty idea.

As someone on Slashdot pointed out, mobile platforms would have control issues trying to play console and PC games. There is an expanding market for smartphone games out there already; anyone who wants to play games on their smartphone is likely to reject the onlive service due to bad controls in addition to the problems the service has on PCs.

And there's still the issue of physical bandwidth limitations and connection instability on phone networks.

 

[Silellak]

To be honest, this OnLive shit could actually find itself used in mobile phone gaming. Only problem is, to be able to even use it, you'd probably need to have a pretty damn expensive net connection to begin with, not to mention that the battery load would seriously limit the whole gaming thing. If someone were to go so far just to play the games, $10 platform fee would be peanuts.

Then again, this is still a stupid pointless shitty idea.

As someone on Slashdot pointed out, mobile platforms would have control issues trying to play console and PC games. There is an expanding market for smartphone games out there already; anyone who wants to play games on their smartphone is likely to reject the onlive service due to bad controls in addition to the problems the service has on PCs.

Well, controls-wise, there's no reason OnLive couldn't release a Bluetooth controller specifically designed to work with their OnLive apps. Too bad controls are the least of OnLive's issues.