OnLive Begins Beta Testing

Steve Perlman, CEO of OnLive, has announced that beta testing is now underway for the cloud gaming service that aims to take the processing burden for cutting-edge games off a player's computer and use remote servers instead. Reaction to this service and competitor GaiKai has been interest tempered with skepticism, but users can now sign up to test it themselves and see if the reality matches the hype. There will be hardware and connectivity restrictions to start: "When you sign up for OnLive Beta, you tell us some general information about your ISP, your computer configuration and your location. We use this information to organize Beta testers into test groups so that our engineering team can focus at different times on testing different situations. If you are a potential fit for a particular test group, we'll send you an invitation email, asking you to run a detailed Performance Test on your network connection and your computer configuration."

Comments

20 computers at 250ms?

[h00manist]

I wonder if we install this on all the computers here, will it play well on any pc, or just the newer ones..? and as for latency? "Cheap hardware" isn't exactly cheap for the whole world. I'm in South America, so 50ms is just not happening.

The timing is perfect!

[Drakkenmensch]

Just in time for the american ISPs clamoring to lower the DSL speed requirements, potentially giving this new technology its death sentence before it even starts.