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Most of the American population lives in very dense city or outlying environments. If you live way out in a tiny town in the middle of nowhere, you’re going to have problems — but those areas have limited portions of the overall population.

Geographically, it’s a very large country spread far apart. But for the most part it’s big cities and urban/suburban environments with large spans of nothing in-between.

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As he said, easily 2 megabits. Times eight hours a day. Times two people. That’s 2 megabits for 16 hours a day. That’s almost 450gb of bandwidth a month. That’s 200 gigabytes over the limit with comcast. Assuming you don’t do ANYTHING ELSE online EVER. And for the people with other plans that only have 5gb or 30gb a month? Wow…

So, with a 250gb monthly transfer limit, that would give you a total of 8.9 hours of play per day split among all people on your network and assuming you do NOTHING ELSE EVER ON THE INTERNET.

So unless ISPs change their attitudes VERY SOON… or unless these services do special deals with ISPs (goodbye net neutrality!), this is going to take a long time to be terribly viable in a lot of situations. And again, that’s using his base mentioned amount of 2mbps.

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The problem as I see it here (assuming the tech works in the first place) is that most people who are interested can afford a decent PC to play games on and a pretty large part of the population don’t live in urbanized areas, and are limited to either pretty bad DSL connections or mobile internet connections, both with acceptable bandwidths, but pretty horrible latency issues.

There’s also a pretty big difference between what people have available to them and what they actually use and are willing to pay for.

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what a terrible implementation of the flash player

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Especially regarding growing the market thing. I can’t recall any specific figures or references off the top of my head (perhaps someone can help me out) but as I remember the figures for the number of people playing any sort of game from solitaire up is huge compared to those who play what most of us think of as mainstream games. If they can put demos in web pages so that no download or install procedure is required then I think it’ll grow the market quite massively because as simple as those things seem to us they are major barriers to a lot of people. The number of people I’ve seen almost quake in fear and take minutes to answer the questions asked during an install procedure is pretty similar to the number of non-gamers I’ve seen install anything.

I don’t think OnLive will ever be a commercial success because I don’t think they’ll be able to deliver the service people want at the costs people are willing to pay but I reckon in a couple of years Gaikai might well become as normal a part of the web as embedded videos are now.

For me? Well I don’t think this is really for me, like you I’m one of the hardcore who already spends far too much money games as it is, I don’t think we’re the target audience. That’s ok for Gaikai because we’re also a tiny minority of the potential market.

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I’m in the UK with Virgin Media. 20mb cable connection. I seem to get less than a quarter of my speed during evenings and most of the weekend… often lag spikes joining the party too.

Apparently it will be fixed by the end of the year once their new 50mb service boxes are in place. Still no sign of that happening so far, but fingers crossed. It’s been messed up like this since January. But they decided it’s not cost effective to fix, rather upgrade it a year later. :/

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OnLive was interesting because it was first, this service is completely uninteresting to almost anyone who has their own decent PC and is sitting on a line decent enough to DL steam titles anywhere, anytime.

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