otoy posts

Earlier this week it was revealed that OnLive had officially gotten a patent on its cloud-based streaming game PC technology. Now VentureBeat is reporting that OnLive's biggest rival in this still small business, Gaikai, isn't all that concerned that OnLive's patent claim will hurt Gaikai. Company CEO Dave Perry states that Gaikai has filed for a number of patents for its own tech and says, "With regard to OnLive's new patent, we are not concerned with making set-top boxes, which is the focus of OnLive's patent, because from the beginning we decided to go frictionless and not require a specific hardware configuration."

Meanwhile we are still waiting for Gaikai to go live for the rest of the world; Perry said that the service was supposed to come out of its beta phase in mid-December but so far that has yet to occur.

Launched last June, the OnLive streaming PC/Mac gaming service has been slowly adding to its list of titles that it has available to its customers. While the company is privately owned and has so far not revealed how many subscribers it has, VentureBeat reports that the company could be worth as much as $1.1 billion.

That's according to a regulatory filing in the state of Delaware and some analysis of the filing from Justin Byers, analyst at VCExperts.com. OnLive has gotten investment money from a number of sources including AT&T and Warner Bros. The company also has investments from BT and Belgacom Group who plan to launch OnLive in the UK and Belgium, respectively. OnLive has not commented on the filing report.

While OnLive certainly has the upper hand in terms of media exposure for its upcoming streaming game service for the PC and Mac, another rival service, Otoy, is planning its own launch in the near future. While not as well known as OnLive, Otoy has some big name partners in its venture, including chip maker AMD.

Otoy, who actually first announced their plans in January 2009, ahead of OnLive's first reveal, now plans to launch its streaming game tech sometime in the summer using AMD's Fusion Render Cloud Servers as its basis (the servers themselves are scheduled to be ready in the second quarter of 2010) . VentureBeat reports that each of AMD's supercomputers has 128 servers that can handle 3,000 customers with high-def streaming downloads.

Unlike OnLive, however, Otoy doesn't have a specific launch date, pricing plan or a list of games it plans to offer on its service. At the moment it looks like OnLive and perhaps even its other rival Gaikai have the momentum going to launch their own services ahead of Otoy.

The big news of the past week for desktop gamers was the official release of Nvidia's GTX 295 dual-GPU card to the wild. Not content to sit on their hands, AMD announced, via the ever-thrilling Press Release, that they're undertaking development of a platform to provide high-shiny graphics to devices that don't sport the hardware to create them, as well as a realtime rendering system for photorealistic content that developers and cinematographers can utilize.

So, it looks like both ends of the spectrum are getting some love. Maybe even a three-way kind of thing.

At some point, BI's mind will leave the gutter it currently inhabits, but we don't advise anyone to hold their breath waiting for that to happen. (Hey, at least there hasn't been a "Two chips, one card" joke made yet. Oh, wait....)

Server-side software is becoming more of a buzz word now in PC applications, as is "cloud computing" but PC processor maker AMD wants to see PC games and other media join in that streaming method. During CES this week AMD announced a plan with a software company called OTOY (pronounced O-Toy) to create a new super computer that could make this possible.

The computer effort is called the AMD Fusion Render Cloud and AMD claims this will be the fastest super computer ever made with a goal to break the one petaFLOPS barrier in processing power. AMD say the computer will "enable content providers to deliver video games, PC applications and other graphically-intensive applications through the Internet "cloud" to virtually any type of mobile device with a web browser without making the device rapidly deplete battery life or struggle to process the content."

In a CES address can can been seen at this web site, AMD showed a notebook computer that ran Mercenaries 2 with the game being streamed to the notebook via a web browser rather than stored on the hard drive. The game's publisher Electronic Arts seemed to embrace this new way of distributing games; At the moment, AMD plans to hae their Fusion Render Cloud project up and running by the second half of 2009.