OnLive, the company offering console-style gaming over the internet, is planning to use its technology and data centres to offer remote computing to consumers and businesses.
Speaking as OnLive announced iPad and Android apps for its service, Steve Perlman, chief executive and founder, said it would be breaking down boundaries in serving not just games, but distributing movies and television and allowing access to sophisticated software programmes.
“It’s a huge democratisation of applications as well as entertainment … in some sense, we’re showing that we’ve solved cloud computing,” he told me, in an interview.
Many other services offer remote computing, but OnLive has conquered the difficult task of enabling gamers to play high-definition games over broadband connections without noticeable lag.
That means its data centre infrastructure and compression technologies can also be adapted to serve other media and full-blown software applications.
Mr Perlman demonstrated on Tuesday how an iPad could run Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser with Flash and Silverlight programs, while an Android tablet could run Apple’s Quicktime – in both cases, the software was being served from OnLive’s data centres.
He also showed a sophisticated 3D rendering program – Autodesk’s Maya – being served onto a simple mobile device.
“There are lots of applications for this, such as collaboration – I can see a dozen high school students around the world getting together to do a 3D movie and winning a movie contract,” he said.
The iPad and Android apps will allow users to view games being played by others in its Arena spectators feature and also view Brag Clip video highlights, as well as chat live with other players.
However, users will not be able to play games on the apps until next year, when publishers are expected to adapt their games for touch and motion controls. Serving applications is also planned for 2011 and there is no date yet for streaming movies and television, although with Warner Bros being an investor in OnLive, this has always been the plan.
OnLive launched in June and was initially available on PCs and Macs. A $99 MicroConsole set-top box went on sale this month to bring its service to TVs. It is launching a $10 a month all-you-can-eat subscription plan next month for playing a selection of games, similar to the Netflix movie-streaming model.
