Welcome, My Son, to the Virtual Machine

By Tsahi Levent-Levi

Categories: Clients

April 2nd, 2009

Ran, over at our Code of Contact blog, just purchased a new PC for his home, as the old one just didn’t cut it. If there was anything he was really excited about in the whole purchasing process, it was the new set of visual capabilities he is getting out of his new toy (ah, the things you learn during the bi-weekly bloggers lunch…).

But the billions-of-dollars question is: will he be excited enough to purchase his NEXT PC, or will he just use “the cloud” instead? After all, we are already using hosted services for various activities – backing our data on a remote virtual disk space, such as YouTube or Flickr, and not locally, or preparing and saving documents using hosted services, such as Google Docs – so why not use it for gaming?!

A new company called OnLive is offering gamers just that. Forrester Research’s Josh Bernoff explained OnLive’s offering of Cloud Gaming on the groundswell blog:

1. OnLive has a bunch of servers on the net, running Windows. Soon some will be running Linux.

2. On these servers are running a bunch of games. OnLive has agreements with all the biggest third-party game makers including Electronic Arts, Ubisoft, Take-Two, and Warner.

3. Because of arrangements OnLive has made with many of the biggest broadband providers, these games can be streamed to most of the US.

4. This means you can play the games on any PC or Mac or with a small and presumably cheap controller, on your TV or HDTV. No console.

The secret sauce here is very low-latency delivery of compressed, fast-motion, regular or high-definition video from those servers to whatever screen you have in your house, be it a TV screen or a computer screen.

Josh goes on to say how this can virtually lead to a service that replaces your PC altogether – all you will be left with will be a screen, connected to the internet, and the actual PC will “run in the cloud”. This will also make the debate over desktop operating system moot and the browser wars fiercer.

Latency and bandwidth are key for this to be viable at all, and may only be possible today if such a service is provided directly from your service provider, hosted on its servers. That said, it makes perfect sense for broadband providers to move beyond “just” bandwidth and to provide low latency as well: it is essential for hosted services, as well as visual communication services. It will even allow them to offer new services to their customers.

Just imagine switching your TV (and set-top box) on, taking out the wireless keyboard and mouse, switching to the “My PC” channel, and starting to work (or enjoy yourself).

And if you need an upgrade of memory or disk space, you just switch to the “online store” channel, select what you want upgraded, and you have it in a flash – instant gratification.

Welcome to the virtual machine. Ran (and you) will never have to purchase another PC.