Rumor: Microsoft’s Cloud based streaming service is called “Rio”

[Osc89]

Machiavellian said:

Osc89 said:

Puppyroach said:

The thing is you forget MS has a much longer history than what we hear now. They have servers in every corner of the world and are first and foremost a software company with lots of competence in that area.

Gaikai has the world record for the world's most widespread cloud gaming network, so they have the coverage. The analysis by DF found that the quality beat out OnLive, and the latency was able to equal a 360 game. This was over a year ago. I get that you are an MS supporter, but is all this really beaten by rumour?

Isn't it kind of easy to get a record when there is only 2 players in the race.  I am not sure if Gaikai beat Onlive since both have their strengths and weakness.  Gaikai had better image quality but ran games at 30FPS.  Online looks to run all their games at 60FPS but by doing so, the image quality was not as good as Gaikai.  It really is up to the gamer which is more important, speed or image quality.  Crysis 2 showed how a demanding game can impact controller response and latency in the signal.  

One part of the article that I have talked about that will be key to acceptance of Gaikai, especially in the US and maybe even going up against MS is how close the datacenter is to the customer.  Here is a blurb from that article that should be very interesting.

"On the other hand, Gaikai's server for supplying the UK is based in London (around 52 miles from where we tested the service) and it appears that the closeness of the server allows for levels of latency on a par, or even better than OnLive, even with the video stream being encoded at half the frame-rate."

I believe location will be the key to how well Gaikai or even MS Rio works and the quality of service both can provide.

There were at least 6 cloud gaming companies running at the time of the award, and more have launched since. But I only mentioned it because it was for covering the most countries, it had nothing to do with the quality of the service.

I'm impressed that being 52 miles away has such good latency, as this means that one server location would cover one fifth of England. That assumes that 52 miles is the limit, it could actually be better. Do you know what would still count as "close" to a server?

Given that both MS and Sony are going down this path (and putting a lot of money into it) they both must believe that a good quality service is a reasonable proposition. While I doubt MS is concered whether they will match the technical quality of the service, they will have much more of an issue when it comes to game quantity. Sony has a whole extra generation of games they can put on the service. This, and being a year behind, are bigger problems.