First, the servers that will be hosting and processing the PC games will have to be of a pretty high spec to run games like Crysis at a high resolution and frame rate. Can you give us an idea of the hardware that will be put into the machines?

Without giving away our secret sauce, I can say that the servers have been custom built by OnLive to run high-end games like Crysis better than you can on a typical home gaming rig (which clearly means lots of CPU, GPU and plenty of RAM to make it all work). Additionally, our servers go well beyond this because, in addition to running any given game at top speed, we need to do all the fancy bits to get it down into your home with instant response time. Which means we needed to create entirely custom gear to do this. What's nice about the design, though, is that we can continue to upgrade it over time, so that as the performance of various components continues to evolve, our service grows along with it.

How close must a user for OnLive be in relation to the servers to get the best effect?

By the time we launch the consumer service nationwide, we'll have multiple server centers strategically located around the country making distance a non-issue for our users. The key element for performance and resolution is just making sure that a gamer has adequate bandwidth to his / her home, which is covered by nearly any typical DSL or Cable connection these days.
More and more we are seeing cable ISPs setting download limits for their customers. You are offering a streaming service that could generate a lot of bandwidth for each user. Are you concerned that people might go over their monthly limit by using OnLive?

Although the OnLive service requires a 5Mbps connection for HDTV resolution, that's mostly just to handle the peak data rate. The *average* data rate is probably going to be less than half that. The actually data rate varies depending on the nature of game play, but as a rough estimate, we expect a typical user might average about 2Mbps while connected to OnLive. Given this, a user can estimate how many hours of OnLive gameplay would exceed monthly caps. For those that have rolled them out, different ISPs have announced various monthly caps for different tiers of service. For example, Comcast announced a 250GB/monthly cap. So at 2Mbps (about 1GB/hour), it would take a user >250 hours to consume 250GB. Just to put that in perspective, Nielson estimates that typical users play about 60 hours/month, so even hardcore gamers should be in great shape where these caps do exist...

The service depends on a constant online connection but sometimes Internet connections get cut off, sometimes for hours and occasionally longer. Will there be a way for people to perhaps download games from OnLive to their hard drive so they can still play games even if their Internet connection doesn't work?

No, downloading just doesn't fit in with our system; we're focused purely on delivering games on demand delivered in real-time over the internet, that's what allows us to do all the cool things we do. The reality is that internet connectivity is becoming more ubiquitous and reliable every day, with more and more services running on top of it, including things like video on demand and telephony. If, for any reason, your connection is genuinely lost, though, OnLive will simply pause the game, and you can resume the game where you left off when the connection returns.