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OnLive Launches Server-based Gaming Platform

A new gaming platform was unveiled today at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, by a company called OnLive. Their new platform is aiming to change the way the games industry works, by ditching the idea of having to use games consoles or expensive high-end PCs to play the latest games. The OnLive service runs games remotely on their servers and sends back a video stream of the game to the user. By utilising some decent video compression, they claim that they can run the service with a latency of around 1ms (excluding any latency from your internet connection). This should allow them to deliver games at standard-definition with a 1.5mbit connection or high-definition with a 4-5mbit connection. As the processing of the game is done on their servers (which receive upgrades every 6 months), rather than the user’s machine, the service can be used on anything from a low-end laptop to a high-end desktop machine. They are even launching a standalone “MicroConsole”, tentatively priced at “less than a Wii”, which can be connected to a TV via HDMI for users that want to play games on their TV. With support from EA, Ubisoft, Take-Two, THQ, Codemasters, Atari, Epic, Eidos and Warner Brothers, the platform seems to have already made an impression with most of the serious players in the games industry. OnLive is expected to launch as a beta service this winter in the US, offering a monthly subscription-based service at multiple pricing tiers. For an in-depth interview with OnLive CEO, Steve Perlman (responsible for other technologies such as QuickTime and WebTV), you can check out the two-part GameTrailers Video Interview here and here.

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Plans for new Pirate Bay are revealed

Posted by chilano | Posted in Software | Posted on 18-07-2009

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Since The Pirate Bay sold out to the Swedish firm, Global Gaming Factory, there hasn’t really been a lot of information about what GGF’s plans for the torrent site would involve. In a recent blog post by Wayne Rosso of the now infamous Grokster service, a little more has been revealed about how GGF are changing The Pirate Bay and what that means for its users.

The new business model will involve TPB turning into a legitimate site, where content owners are paid for the content that they allow to be distributed via torrents listed on the site. Since the current advert revenues generated by its users are nowhere near enough to cover those kind of sums, users of the site will apparently be charged a monthly fee for access. Interestingly, users will be able to reduce this monthly fee if they allow their computer’s resources to be used by TPBs network. Supposedly the more resources a user contributes, the more their monthly fee can be reduced.

While details of precisely what the network of user computers will be used for are pretty slim, it seems like TPB will be offering cloud services that would compete with Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud and Akamai. However, it’s unclear whether the network is going to be using computer resources for processing information, or bandwidth resources for helping to deliver content.

Regardless of what TPB do with the computer resources in their user network, it’s debatable whether their users will actually stick around to use the service, since we just have to look back at how unsuccessful the relaunches of Napster, Kazaa and Grokster have been at retaining users. If the music and film industries ever hope to win this battle, they ultimately need to recognise that the world has changed and they need to change too.

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