Uh what? This a lot different than Netflix buddy.
There are no companies out there with algorithms as advanced as gaikai and onlive.
At this point much of the tech is now being built directly by nVidia. Who have surpassed the initial innovations by companies like OnLive.
http://www.nvidia.com/object/cloud-gaming.html
It's who GaiKai is now partnered with. But it was initially innovators taking GPUs and doing things with them no-one else had done as successfully. In particular virtualization making the idea of cloud gaming remotely cost-effective (I still question whether it truly is, compared to the ever-shrinking cost of having client hardware that can render great looking games anyways), and getting the video encoding/streaming speed down to as few as milliseconds as possible.
Once nVidia stepped in they've been able to decrease the total milliseconds it takes to interpret commands and have video frames to return to the user WAY down. From their site:
That chart is slightly misleading IMO, as it includes a cut-down time for getting frames to your TV, which I believe is a client-side tech that most devices won't have for some time.. but it is indicative of a future where various areas of current "latency" we deal with are getting cut down.. which means that adding in the latency of the best-possible "Cloud Gaming" architecture might very soon feel EXACTLY like the local games of today.
Of course.. remove that latency and you also get better locally rendered games.. that people might get used too.. and then even though cloud feels like current games, we all think it's slightly delayed anyways, lol.
At this point the gameplay is pretty damn good.. the bigger issue being the inability to actually be able to afford to grant enough horsepower to make the video not look.. "off." Low settings in the game, and since the encoding has to be FAST, it's highly compressed video.
It just doesn't quite look as good as a locally rendered game. And they aren't currently able to afford to push graphics that are even on-par with current-gen consoles.. OnLive was barely competing graphically while bleeding money like crazy.
My hope for Sony is that they can actually get people to spend big cash for games on Gaikai. If Gran Turismo 6 can sell 5 million GaiKai licenses at $60 a pop.. that is an entirely different game that Sony is playing than the currently dinky sales of OnLive and Gaikai.. and they might be able to afford to actually make the games look good.
Especially if they can make the clients exclusive to their own products when it comes to the living room. Only Sony TV's have this client.. suddenly all of us gamers have a reason to choose a Sony TV. Suddenly new people might think about buying games via their Sony TV. Imagine if Madden 2014 ads are showing up on your Sony HDTV during football games.
I think Sony is maybe the one company that can afford a cloud gaming service that actually has so many side-benefits that the expense of such an incredible server architecture would be justified.
But I still have my doubts...
Imagine if everyone accessing PSN right now was actually rendering a game.. that would quite probably require 100's or even 1,000's of times the computing resources as PSN currently does.. with far more server farms, more closely disperesed to more people because of how important latency is, and the reality that it IS in fact affected by the distance and the speed of light over copper/fiber/etc.
I ramble about this.
lol