No disks, consoles needed for startup's video games streamed over the Internet

SAN FRANCISCO - Music and movies can be streamed over the Internet, so why not video games?

A startup founded by technology entrepreneur Steve Perlman says it has developed a technology to deliver video games on demand, an idea that threatens to eventually take consoles out of the equation.

OnLive Inc., Perlman's Palo Alto, Calif.-based company, unveil its technology Tuesday at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco.

Seven years in the works, OnLive says it has developed a way to stream video games without any lag that humans can notice. So the instant you press a button to shoot something on the screen, the gun goes off.

This has not been possible before, because unlike with music and movies, which can be compressed before being streamed, video games are interactive and require instant responses. That has meant video games needed to be played on consoles packed with computing power, like the Xbox or the PlayStation, or downloaded to personal computers.

OnLive's technology gets around that limitation with a new form of compression that lets its game servers communicate with players over broadband connections in real time. This also means OnLive's service can work on older computers, even those without a graphics processing unit that has until now been an essential component of gaming. Through a "MicroConsole" about the size of a cassette tape, OnLive's service will also be available for television sets.

"It's the last console you'll need," said Perlman, a former principal scientist at Apple who in 1995 co-founded WebTV, bringing Internet access to TV sets.

OnLive plans to launch its service late this year for monthly subscription fees it has not disclosed.