OnLive Opens Beta For Cloud Computing Game Service

OnLive, which announced its cloud computing gaming service at GDC 2009, revealed today that it has entered open beta. The service allows gamers to play PC titles through their own PCs or television sets, without needing to render the game on their own hardware -- rather, it is rendered remotely and sent frame-by-frame back to the local display device. In a blog post, OnLive CEO Steve Perlman described the unique challenges of the beta rollout. "One of the key challenges that OnLive technology addresses is providing a high-quality, fast-response gaming experience over a wide range of situations: different speeds/locations/types of broadband services, a variety of different PC and Mac configurations, several kinds of input and display devices, etc," he said. "So, a major focus of OnLive Beta is to test as many of these different situations as we can." Though there are competitors in the cloud computing game-service space, such as Dave Perry's Gaikai, OnLive is the first to enter into public beta. OnLive requires a small download to function on PC, or a dongle called a MicroConsole in order to interact with televisions. It appears that at the present time, only the PC service is being beta tested. The beta is ongoing, and still accepting new applicants on both Windows and Mac-based operating systems. "Beta is an awesome milestone for OnLive, capping many years of work," said Perlman. "We’re really looking forward to hearing what [users] think."