Buy Once, Play Anywhere…
Ahhh, the dream of so many consumers – buy an entertainment title one time, and play it anywhere. Buy Grand Theft Auto, and play it on your console, on your PC, on your portable device, on your laptop (maybe even on a flight from JFK to SFO on American Airlines). Well, I can dream, can’t I?
Thanks to Steve Perlman (notice how he spells it incorrectly 
), founder of OnLive, there might be a glimmer of hope for the video gaming industry, at least. OnLive streams video games over the Internet so that it’s actually playing back on the OnLive servers instead of your device in your living room. Say goodbye to the PS3, XBox, Wii or PC? Probably not quite yet, but such a mainstream offering for major titles is quite interesting.
Of course, there are going to be some major challenges to this. I quite agree with Richard Leadbetter who wrote an article for Eurogamer. In it, he questions the practicality of the service in its ability to scale. 1 million gamers sucking down 50+ FPS at the same time is a scary thought to anyone who has experience building large systems. (From my own personal experience, I was able to build out a system that supported 50,000 – 100,000 concurrent users. It was quite a task!)
But, I do think that Perlman has the generally right idea — to enable buy once, play anywhere, we really need to be able to build out digital libraries that can be streamed (and/or downloaded) to devices that live at the edge of the network. Buy a video game (or movie) once, and then stream (or download for offline use) onto the individual devices. Sadly, at the same time that Sun Microsystems is being bought by IBM, the dream of ‘the network is the computer’ may finally be seing mainstream America.
