21st Century Digital Boy

Just a quick one here. OnLive is a “Microconsole(TM)” system – you get a little widget that you attach to your TV and play games that run and render on OnLive’s servers, then stream the video and audio to yours. Sounds cool, doesn’t it? If only it would plausibly work.

Two of the issues I can see tie in to a statement printed in the June 2009 issue of EDGE:

“It’s claimed that a 1.5Mbps connection will be good enough for standard definition, while a 5Mbps connection is required for a high-definition output.”

This sounds plausible enough to me – although proper HD-encoded video frequently runs at 15Mbps or even 25Mbps, but even at 1.5/5Mbps this results in two problems.

Firstly, it means that unless you’ve got an internet connection that can reliably deliver 5Mbps, you’ll be playing in Youtube-o-vision. Yay.

Secondly, it means that if you play even on “standard resolution”, at least in Britain your internet provider’s Fair Use Policy is going to go medieval on you. BT’s standard 1Mbps DSL connection has a FUP of 1GB a month; I’m on Eclipse which run at 5, 10 or 20 for the various price plans. Let’s do a little math: 1.5Mbps equals 0.1875 megabytes a second, which equals 11.25 megabytes a minute. To fill 1GB, this takes about 88 minutes. So for every gigabyte on your monthly Fair Use Policy, you can play for about one and a half hours before you hit the limit. That’s seven and a half hours of OnLive a month on my connection if I don’t do anything else on the internet.

Moreover and unrelatedly to the bandwidth numbers, there’s going to be a hell of a lot of input lag. While sub-100ms latency is standard on modern broadband connections, this still means that there will be a significant and noticable delay between what you do on your OnLive system and your actions actually showing up on your screen (since that information has to make the trip from your end to OnLive’s servers and back to your TV). While OnLive keep jabbering on about “Low Latency Video”, this is just how the internet works, so unless they’ve somehow invented a better internet or better physics, this is how it’s going to be.

Here’s a neat little demonstration of input lag. Only goes to 80ms, on average internet connections you can expect that and slightly more.