ISP BT Retail has today given its official support to the controversial OnLive service, which allows you to play the latest PC, PS3 and XBox360 games (Mass Effect2, Borderlands etc.) without even owning them. The service works by using your broadband internet connection to stream a live video feed of the game to your screen where it can be controlled remotely.


The OnLive service is certainly a revolutionary idea, but can it work? One of the obvious concerns is that, in order to offer a strong experience, such a service would have to stream the video at a very high quality and with low latency to prevent synchronisation problems. That's hard to do on most UK connections.

OnLive would also put a lot of pressure on an ISP's network (bandwidth) and could run into problems with the Fair Usage Policies (FUP) adopted by many broadband providers, especially those offering "unlimited" services. However one solution to this is for the ISP to reach a special content agreement with OnLive, which appears to be a big part of BT's plan.


So far as we understand it, customers would need an internet connection speed of 1.5Mbps for Standard Definition (SD) quality gaming; that's probably going to look quite unattractive to gamers who are by now use to High Definition (HD) quality. You can of course get HD too, but for that you'll need 5Mbps (the UK average is between 4-5Mbps). However UK speeds are often also extremely variable.

BT's commercial partnership with OnLive will give the operator exclusive rights to bundle the OnLive® Game Service with broadband in the UK. In conjunction with the commercial partnership, BT has taken a 2.6% shareholding in OnLive Inc. The service itself will launch in the US this summer, following a successful beta trial. BT will announce further details about its own UK launch plans later this year.