A proper Super Killer Application

[VectraMan]

Movies can be compressed well because of type of content they are - it is viewed from distance also, not in front of PC.

Depends on your definition of "well". Obviously a video of a game can be compressed using the same technology, but it may lose more quality than a video of a field. And what goes out on digital TV is compressed in real time, though "real time" is typically a 1 second delay which obviously wouldn't work for a game.

This goes into a bit more technical detail:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7976206.stm

OnLive has said it has created a video compression algorithm designed specifically for video games that can encode and compress video into data in about one millisecond.

A custom-built silicon chip designed by OnLive does the actual encoding calculations at the server end, as well as the decompression at the gamer end, inside a cheap hardware add-on.

Mr Perlman said it had taken "tens of thousand" of man hours to develop the algorithm.

I suspect they're doing some of the actual rendering on the client, so they're just sending the data of what to render down the link rather than actual video.

I think I've seen some jobs advertised for these people too.

[AtW]

Ah, they they expect you to buy their hardware to do decompression?

[DimPrawn]

Ah, they they expect you to buy their hardware to do decompression?

Yes, no more shelling out on hardware to play games....oh hang on.

[Bunk]

Yes, no more shelling out on hardware to play games....oh hang on.

But it's ok, this is the last bit of hardware you'll ever have to buy.

Until the next chip which has better compression therefore allowing higher resolutions etc.

Yeah, I see what you mean