Once flying high on its $1.8 billion valuation, OnLive eventually crashed and burned, having sold out to Lauder Partners in 2012 for just $4.8 million - despite the true value of its patents estimated at the time in the range of hundreds of millions of dollars. For those unfamiliar with OnLive, it's a cloud-based service that streams games over the Internet.
Launched in 2009, it offloads code execution from a local device onto the OnLive cloud, where powerful computers render action based on your input, encode individual frames into a video stream which then gets delivered back to a thin client running on your end.
By virtue of the Internet itself, this allows for more or less smooth gameplay. As games actually run on servers, you don't need to own a ninja PC or install anything - the service automatically applies game patches, add-ons and updates, with the company upgrading its cloud when games push the performance envelope. As a result, you can play latest cutting-edge games on some rather pedestrian hardware.
On the downside, players complained about video artifacts and a slight but noticeable delay, dependent on a number of factors like your geographical location, server load, your Internet connection speed and so forth. After hiring former IGN boss Mark Jung as executive chairman, OnLive has now unveiled a new subscription-based game service, dubbed CloudLift...
