OnLive games service 'will work'

The founder of online streaming games firm OnLive has defended the technology underpinning the service after accusations it was unworkable.

Steve Perlman said critics had not even used the system.

OnLive turns games into video data sent across the net to a hardware add-on, or software plug-in, which decompresses the data back into video.

The firm says a revolutionary video compression algorithm and custom silicon makes it possible.

OnLive has been in development for the last seven years and has signed up content partners, including EA, Ubisoft, Take2, Eidos, Atari, Codemasters, Epic and THQ

The subscription service will feature games such as Burnout, Fear 2, Tomb Raider: Underworld and Crysis: Warhead.

We are not doing video encoding in the conventional sense Steve Perlman, OnLive

Mr Perlman, who led the early developments into video streaming service QuickTime while at Apple, told BBC News: "We have nine of the largest game publishers in world signed up.

"They have spent several years in some cases actually going and reviewing our technology before allowing us to associate with their company names and allowing us to have access to their first-tier franchises."

The service has raised eyebrows in some quarters given the difficulties of encoding High Definition video in near real time at servers in data centres, and streaming it over the open internet to a user.

Delivering real-time streaming game play is seen by some as an insurmountable problem, even before factoring in the necessity of sending back telemetry from a game controller across the net to the data centre.

"We are not doing video encoding in the conventional sense," explained Mr Perlman, dismissing an article in gaming website Eurogamer that said the service was unworkable.

"It's a very ignorant article," said Mr Perlman, who said Eurogamer had conflated issues of frame rate and latency.

"They are independent factors," he said.

OnLive has said it has created a video compression algorithm designed specifically for video games that can encode and compress video into data in about one millisecond.

A custom-built silicon chip designed by OnLive does the actual encoding calculations at the server end, as well as the decompression at the gamer end, inside a cheap hardware add-on.

Mr Perlman said it had taken "tens of thousand" of man hours to develop the algorithm.

He said: "First of all it was a postage stamp size screen with no latency over the internet. It looked like the silliest kind of game because the screen size was smaller than a cell phone but nonetheless there was no lag.

"We were running Quake actually - or micro quake as we called it. It was very unimpressive to anyone apart from an engineer."

The algorithm is not perfect. You will sometimes see little artefacts on the screen Steve Perlman, OnLive

After years spent refining the technology OnLive has said it was able to make the video window bigger and bigger until achieving a resolution of 1280 by 720 at 60 frames per second.

Technologists contacted by BBC News said that that level and speed of video encoding would not be "beyond the bounds of credibility" but would require custom hardware.

The algorithm was developed on dual quad core Xeon processors, which cost thousands of pounds, but OnLive have said they have distilled it down so it can run on a custom chip which costs "under 20 bucks to make".

Mr Perlman said the chip was "high performance for video compression", running at less than 100Mhz clock speed and drawing about two watts of power.

"We can make millions of these things. Because of the economy there is plenty of excess capacity in fabrication plants."

Mr Perlman said OnLive had already ordered a "very large batch".

He said the OnLive experience was almost as good as sitting in front of a console and playing a game.

"The algorithm is not perfect. You will sometimes see little artefacts on the screen. Video compression is part science and part art.

Net imperfections

"Every time you present new material to it, you will see something it does not compress so well. We note those and correct the algorithm."

Mr Perlman said the algorithm had been designed with the imperfections of the internet in mind.

"Rather than fighting against the internet... and dropped, delayed or out of order packets we designed an algorithm that deals with these characteristics.

"Every compression algorithm leaves something out. It's about figuring out what kind of stuff you drop out."

OnLive said a broadband connection of 5Mbps will be fast enough for high definition gaming, while 1.5Mbps will be sufficient for standard definition.

At those speeds and with a data centre no further than 1,000 miles away for any gamer in the US the inevitable latency of the net as data has to physically travel across the network is within tolerable limits, said Mr Perlman.

The MicroConsole connects the TV to the internet

OnLive currently has two data centres in the US running a beta version of the service. In order to minimise lag across when the commercial service goes live at the end of 2009 the company has said it will need five data centres around the country.

"The round trip latency from pushing a button on a controller and it going up to the server and back down, and you seeing something change on screen should be less than 80 milliseconds.

"We usually see something between 35 and 40 milliseconds."

The games themselves will be running on "off the shelf motherboards" at the data centres.

The company has calculated that each server will be dealing with about 10 different gamers, because of the varying demands games have on hardware.

"Most games run fine on dual core processors. What you really want is a high performance graphics processor unit," said Mr Perlman.

He said that while work continued on refining the algorithm the bulk of the technical work had been completed.

A wider beta test begins this summer and feedback from the testing will be used to refine the service.

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Google introduces phone services

Google has strengthened its mobile services with the debut of a service called Voice that could be a challenge to Skype and other phone firms.

It lets customers make cheap international calls and gives them a speech-to-text feature for voicemail.

The services are available thanks to Google's acquisition of phone firm GrandCentral which gives users a lifelong universal phone number.

"This could be big. Google is seen as disruptive," said analyst Jon Arnold.

"They are a wild card in telecoms and wireless but this is Google and they are very smart at what they do.

"The core of Google's business is search and for a long time the industry was concerned about the GrandCentral acquisition. What was the fit? What was the motivation? It will be interesting to see where they ultimately go with this," said Mr Arnold, principal of analyst firm J Arnold & Associates.


Table stakes

Google Voice is the first major update to GrandCentral, which Google bought for an undisclosed sum, thought to be $50m (£36m) in 2007.

The service gives subscribers one number that lets them route all their phones through - home, office and mobile.

Users also get a single voicemail account regardless of which phone messages are left on.
Screen grab of Skype website


Google Voice is the latest attempt by the company to reach out beyond online search and advertising.

Domestic calls will be free but international calls will require users to set up a Google Checkout account. Calls to landlines in the UK will cost 2 cents per minute.

EBay's Skype offers free domestic and international calls made over the internet from one computer to another, but there is a charge to landlines and mobile phones.

Skype president Josh Silverman told analysts and investors that "chat and voice will become table stakes". He also revealed that the company is adding 350,000 new users a day and is on track to do more than 100 billion calling minutes in 2009 alone.

Google does not view the service as a threat to Skype or other telecom companies any more than its Google Talk offering, which lets users chat over the internet for free.

"This is about allowing your existing phone to work better," said Craig Walker, now group product manager for real time communications at Google and co-founder of GrandCentral.

"It's not that we are replacing your phone, we are giving [it] the ability to work better," he said.

He declined to say how many users had signed up. Google Voice is currently only available to former GrandCentral users.

"Chore"

Google Voice also allows all voice messages to be turned into text which will then be sent either through an e-mail or an sms.

"Voicemail can be a pretty negative experience for a lot of people," said Mr Walker.

"Now it's about putting the user in control. We will transcribe voicemails and convert it into text and put it in your inbox so that it's searchable and you will always have a record of that voicemail.

"Voicemail need no longer be the chore it has been in the past," he declared.

Mr Walker demonstrated its search capabilities by displaying the 1,000 or so voicemails he had accumulated while testing the system over the past few months.

By typing "pool man" in a search box, he located an old voicemail from December 2008. Returned results were in both text and audio form.

"I would never have been able to find that number. The phone company deletes everything for you after a couple of weeks and the scrap of paper I wrote the number on is long gone. This feature makes your voicemail a pretty powerful tool," said Mr Walker.

Opportunity

Google boss Eric Schmidt said he viewed mobile as the next big opportunity.

At the recent Morgan Stanley Technology Conference in San Francisco, Mr Schmidt said he believed mobile search revenues would over take those on a PC within a few years

"The fact of the matter is that mobile devices are going to be the majority of the way that people get information," he said.

A report in February by the Kelsey Group suggested that "about 20% of U.S. cell phone subscribers are on the mobile web right now and only about 5.2 million are doing searches".

Mr Arnold said that if Google perfected its speech-to-text feature to other languages, all bets were off.

"This could be very powerful given the globalisation of markets. Language is another barrier and when you break that down, the world of communications opens up and globally this has exciting opportunities," he said.

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