haha

Just like the phyiscal media being doomed to die within a couple of years (especially after Blu-ray won the format war) every other week, I think that this is improbable at best. Too many hurdles to jump at this point and for some time, both from a technical and business standpoint.

By the way people this is my opinion is dont write your posts in such a way as to change my mind. Im leavingfor 4 days so y the way i get back this thread will be dead ^^

How exactly do you want us to write our posts if we disagree then? Or are we not allowed to disagree? I don't understand.

There're quite more requirements besides bandwidth, such as responsiveness, high ping will make any gaming experience intolerable. It's loooong way to cloud gaming even from technical standpoint, let alone business-wise.

Yeah, but also availability is a deciding factor and one of the prime reasons why cloud gaming is not a prominent alternative for a long time. In the US, which no one would deny is a highly developed country, roughly 65% of the population has an internet connection and out of all those, the average connection speed is still only slightly higher than double ISDN as far as I remember (the exact figures elude me, I'm afraid). In Europe, there are some countries that have a highly developed broadband structure, such as Sweden but the overall tendency will be similar to that of the US. In Asia, its a whole other deal, while Korea and Japan and richer parts of India have good connections overall, the vast majority of the Asian population (roughly 80-85%) are likely to have dial-up speeds akin to ISDN or even slower.

Such as it is, there are probably somewhere around 500 million broadband subscriptions in the world, whereas half of them are likely business, internet cafes etc, there are also people who have two subscriptions (one satellite for the vacation house/cottage and one for home, for instance) so the real number of personal subscriptions is probably a lot lower in reality. Let's assume that maybe 250-300 million private broadband subscriptions exist today, worldwide, with an average speed of around 500-2500kbit, that leaves an awfully small viable market for cloud gaming (and the "impending death" of the physical media formats). And this will not change any time soon, the spread and development of broadband is really slow in the going, with the penetration rate of DSL connections and even cable still being way below standard 56k dial-up on a worldwide basis.

Also, as you said, mai, ping and other factors count heavily, as well as up speed, which is greatly reduced on DSL line, usually along the lines of one tenth of the down speed (streaming games and HD video will require a lot of packets up and down so the high number os DSL's with reduced up speed will produce a bottleneck even if the down speed is technically sufficent). There are also stability issues, where people who live farther away from the broadband central will have a less stable connection and greatly reduced potential for speed both ways. Gaming in rural areas would be nigh impossible.

In my conclusion, cloud gaming and streaming to the extent where physical HD formats will get killed is a long way off into the future.