the times British Telecom has signed a deal with OnLive of the United States to stream video games as part of BT’s high-end domestic broadband package, the company announced today.
BT will acquire the exclusive rights to OnLive’s service within the UK, and as part of the deal has taken a 2.6 per cent shareholding in OnLive.
OnLive was announced with great fanfare last year, amid claims that it could spell the end of the video games console. The service offers a library of titles from leading games publishers, including Ubisoft and Electronic Arts. The games are played in real time over the internet.
BT subscribers who sign up for the package will receive an “OnLive micro console” about the size of a Freeview box, and a controller. Users can choose whether to rent or buy games, basing their decision on short free trials, and the service is also compatible with personal computers.
Commenting on the deal, Gavin Patterson, CEO of BT Retail, said: “The partnership with OnLive complements our existing BT Vision service. It’s great for our customers - they’ll have access to a huge catalogue of games, available instantly on their TV or PC without expensive hardware. And it’s great for BT - it will enhance our premium broadband position and we’ll be entering into a market that’s worth more than £2 billion.”
Writing in the OnLive blog, Steve Perlman, OnLive Founder and CEO, revealed that interest from Europe for the service, which will launch shortly in the United States, has already been substantial.
“From the day we opened up sign-ups for OnLive’s US Beta testing — making it very clear the sign-ups are for US-only testing by gamers with a US zip code — a huge percentage of the sign-up requests came from gamers from European locations who used popular US zip codes to try to get into the US Beta (indeed, we had more sign-ups using zip code 90210 than the actual population there).”
Mr Perlman also revealed that the service has been undergoing closed testing across Europe. “Secretly, OnLive has been operating a test site in Europe from a BT data centre in Wales since 2009... We’ve tested OnLive across all of Western Europe spanning from the UK to Italy and from Scandinavia down to Spain.”
Neither company has yet revealed a precise launch date for the service, though Mr Perlman suggested that OnLive hopes first to learn lessons from the June 17 US launch before bringing OnLive to the UK.
OnLive is one of several companies looking to bring broadband gaming to the masses. Last year, an Israeli company called Playcast also announced plans for a UK launch. Playcast’s service is already available in Israel, but the UK launch appears to be on hold.
Although the idea of streaming games is not new, the technical problems posed are substantial. Chief among these is “latency”, the inevitable delay between a player pushing a button and the remote server receiving the instruction and transmitting it back to the screen. OnLive and Playcast both claim to have solved this problem with proprietary technology.
