OnLive – From Game Service to Desktop PC
OnLive, pioneers of Cloud Gaming, demonstrate remarkable entrepreneurship and innovation.
They were born around March 2009 with the idea of revolutionizing the market of high-level Video Games, those for local installation on PC, those for PlayStation, XBox, etc. An alternative to online gaming, that of multi-user role-playing games. It differs greatly in that it exploits the CPU and GPU computing power of their servers, and exploits application virtualization technologies (e.g. XenApp, vmware View) and protocols for optimizing these types of traffic (e.g. Citrix ICA and Teradici PCoIP used by vmware View), allows the end user to be able to play with any system without the need for expensive and particular hardware (e.g. expensive graphics cards of the 3D games), and the end user doesn’t need to save locally, or have to buy the license of the game.
OnLive uses the logic of pay per use, pay as much as you play, you could basically finish the game at a cost lower than the purchase license and move on to another one.
A pioneering vision also technological as the virtualization of GPUs then (2009) was not, if I’m not mistaken, yet planned by the big processors, on the other hand we see Intel, nVidia and AMD among the technological partners.
The company’s strategies have always stood out for offering the end user the use of the online platform from any device, their TV (through a micro-console and a controller), or through the wireless controller (bluetooth) connected to the PC, MAC, iPad and tablets in general.
But OnLive still amazes with a completely different commercial strategy, the executive team will have considered being able to take advantage of their extremely powerful and now perfectly consolidated multi-tenant server infrastructure, to provide services to a very specific target, iPad owners.
The offer is the Onlive Desktop, where a Windows 7 desktop is virtualized with the office suite pre-installed, all available through a free App on the App Store.
They have filled a void in the iPad world, where previously there was only the well-known Citrix App (Citrix Receiver for iPad), known from the iPhone world, to virtualize the Windows office.
The business model is 2GB of free space and the rest pay-as-you-go.
Congratulations, a great move. Below are a couple of videos of Cloud Gaming and Onlive Desktop.
