Look how far we’ve come. A year ago, HD video was largely unavailable on the Web. Adobe Flash (the most widely used web video format) didn’t even officially support HD video.
Today, nearly every major video sharing site offers HD video, Amazon has become focused on offering HD video downloads and Major League Baseball (mlb.com) has started streaming live games in HD.
Now comes the next wave in high-quality, on-demand, video-based content; video games.
A startup in Palo Alto, California, OnLive, inc., recently announced that by winter of 2009, they will offer streaming video games over the web.
Why is this significant? It’s because right now if you want to play video games, you have to drive to a store, buy a $300-$400 console and then fork out another $50-$60 per video game. And if it turns out you don’t like a video game…well you’re pretty much stuck with it…there is no “try before you buy” option with video games.
But the service from OnLive will skip all of this. There is no console to buy. There are no games to buy. In fact there are no games to download…everything is streaming in real-time. Want to browse and play the most popular Xbox 360 and PS3 games from your TV, Mac or PC? No problem, you just plug in a small box a go.
And while it seems there would be some glitches (after all, video games are often huge and complex animals), reports from early tester’s say the service is largely flawless. Of course, Internet service providers won’t likely be happy about the potential bandwidth consumption.
If you’d like to learn more about OnLive (and view a demo video), you can visit OnLive’s web site here.