SvennoJ said:
Pemalite said:
The laws of Physics literally comes into play.
Depends on the encoding algorithms in use and the hardware support to go with it.
|
The laws of physics add about 4.8 ms for every 1000 km of glass fibre (light travels about 31% slower through fibre optics) or adds 9.7 ms to ping time per 1000 km. Of course that's the maximum speed on the backbone. The number of hops the signal has to go through to get into your house adds a lot more.
You can test it yourself with Azure http://www.azurespeed.com/
While playing you will have a more stable connection of course, this is just a ping test.
Anyway far above the laws of physics as the nearest server is only 100 km away from me at 50 ms average.
The better the encoding the more expensive the hardware to encode and decode. Yet those will keep getting cheaper over time. When blu-ray came out you pretty much needed most of the ps3 capabilities to decode h.264. The main cost of early blu-ray players was the power needed for decoding. Nowadays h.265 is in newer phones so decoding should be fine. Efficient real time hardware encoding still asks quite a few resources though. And that while people are getting used to 4K60 on their new 65" HDR tvs. My laptop can't handle 4K60 you tube :/ It will be 1080p60 at most I guess. Aiming for 10mbps is decent quality 1080p60.
Streaming will literally lag behind local hardware for quite a while, perhaps indefinitely and we'll reach a point where people won't care about pristine quality and lag free gaming anymore over convenience. Just as Netflix has killed the video store, game streaming could accomplish the same and buying games could become a niche.
I wonder how prices will stabilize for streaming. Netflix went up quite a bit from the early days and has currently 3 tiers for different quality streaming and number of simultaneous clients. The same could happen for games, extra for fast action games, newer games, higher resolution. Commercials in the stream for cheaper subscriptions. Time limited / unlimited. So many possibilities to make money for service providers. That $10 console fee Sony and MS currently get for 3rd party games is nothing compared to that!
|
Great post, obviously te reason everyone is talking streaming is the success of Netflix and Spotify. For my 2 cents, I am becoming disillusioned with streaming, as more and more video services split a finite number of movies among them...will I pay for a Disney service, or will it simpky decrease the value of Netflix for me? Also, why can't I get a single James Bond movie on Netflix? I am curious to see what this does to Netflix in the next 2 years.
