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OnLive's Tom DuBois

The executive producer on cloud gaming, iPad and being valued at $1bn

GamesIndustry.biz Does it require any optimisation of assets, or is that academic when it comes to the on-the-fly encoding?
Tom DuBois

Yeah, we do all that on the fly. We're kind of in between a console and a PC. If a game has been developed for a console it seems to be even easier, in that we want it to use a known amount of storage, you kind of want clean startup and shutdown, we remove some of the video settings – we don't want the users to be able to tweak those – to optimise it. And then we have this overlay menu that's part of the SDK – the game pause, read your messages, jump into another game...

GamesIndustry.biz What's the top tier of resolution and fidelity possible if you're as close as possible to the server farm with a high bandwith?
Tom DuBois

Today we're running at 720p. This is a tech demo that runs on wifi, and what you see there [the pixellisation of the image] is as bandwidth shrinks down thecompression is adapting, and when it shrinks down far enough you actually see the pixelisation. We are getting pretty close to releasing our wifi for the regular service. We've been beta testing it. Really we've been running wifi internally for a long time, but we didn't want to ship with our first product... we wanted people to have a great experience. So even today we have most people when they sign up, there's a little test that runs, you need about 5 megabits per second to get into the service. We can actually run much slower at a lower resolution, but we wanted that initial launch to be high quality HD.

GamesIndustry.biz The obvious question seeing this on iPad is whether it'd work on 3G?
Tom DuBois

Yeah, actually it runs over 3G too. And sometimes people ask about movies – if we can do games, we can obviously do movies. One of our core technologies is this low-latency video compression, but it's actually very high quality. [Loads up a video] You can't really tell on a screen this small, but this trailer has a lot of black, a lot of cuts and it handles it very well. So if you notice, again there's no buffering, it just plays right away.

GamesIndustry.biz How's the uptake going now? I know you've said in the past it exceeded your launch expectations, but how much have they changed and been met?
Tom DuBois

It's been pretty managed. We had a lot of people pre-register and then when we launched at the end of E3 we've basically been letting groups of people in, and monitoring the service, making sure it doesn't fall over. We've had 100 per cent uptimes. So we've let more people in than we forecast, and we'll continue to do that. But I think we're going to manage it as pretty steady growth.

GamesIndustry.biz It's not open access yet, then?
Tom DuBois

Today it's not. We're actually talking about moving to that fairly soon, so there's a little bit of a waiting period still.

GamesIndustry.biz Do you perceive there being competition out there, whether direct by another cloud service or indirect in terms of other instant-access systems such as Gaiki or Google Chrome Web Store? Or do you feel you're too far ahead to worry about those guys?
Tom DuBois

I wouldn't say it that way. [Laughs]. I think Gaiki are a very different business model right now. Again, we're trying to build a platform, we're aiming at the consumer, there's kind of this core video codec but to really launch a platform there's a lot of heavy lifting that we have to address.

We're trying to build this customer service platform that handles consumers calls, billing systems, we have a big operations team building up these data centres... Y'know, if somebody buys a game from us and they can't get to their savegame file or can't log in, it's a big problem. So we're really making a consumer-grade service. Gaiki is selling to a publisher for a demo – if you can't play the demo today but it's there tomorrow it's not a super-big deal. It's not the same kind of mission-critical focus.

GamesIndustry.biz Could you imagine yourself licensing out the tech, as a middleware option for companies who want to stream content – be it games or otherwise?
Tom DuBois

Yeah, absolutely. We picked games as kind of the next media that really needed to move to digital distribution; even with Steam you've got to download a pretty big piece of code before you can start to play.

Then I think the other thing that not a lot of people are talking about yet is the focus on the television and the living room, building the Microconsole... It's about this big [mimes very small box], you plug the Ethernet in, you hook it up to your TV...

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Alec Meer

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A 10-year veteran of scribbling about video games, Alec primarily writes for Rock, Paper, Shotgun, but given any opportunity he will escape his keyboard and mouse ghetto to write about any and all formats.

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