After much anticipation Onlive has been released in the UK. Onlive is a cloud based, video games streaming service. This enables you to stream games to your PC, Mac and TV. The streaming based service means that the specs of your PC aren’t important; the only necessity is a 2mb internet connection, although they recommend 5. I tested the service on a 30mb connection and encountered very few issues. I was able to play a game seconds after signing up and was surprised with how smoothly it ran. The games don’t play quite as well as local games, there are currently some issues with input lag and response delay and video quality isn’t fantastic, video options are not enabled (in the game I tested) so you don’t have the option to crank the graphics up to take advantage of your internet speed. The service isn’t fully fleshed out and such issues are to be expected so early on. Poor infrastructure will hold back the service as many people do not have access to a connection fast enough to play games smoothly. Onlive is also using an interesting pricing plan, you’re able to demo games for 30 minutes for free, rent them, buy them or subscribe to “Play packs”. It’s easy to be sceptical about such a service and there are bound to be some issues to begin with, but as a skeptic myself I must say, it’s better than I expected. 7

Try it out yourself at www.onlive.co.uk