@mcclure111 your Stadia thread yesterday was interesting and I wondered if I could provide some context on the origins of at least some of those cloud gaming systems?
in 90's many cable companies began doing work to transition from analog to digital cable systems. To enable that they had to place set tops in people's homes and figure out how to transmit data instead of just analog TV signals.
2/ the systems they used for controlling the digital boxes came from Motorola and Scientific Atlanta. The Motorola system was designed to work over satellite and had little to no "back' channel. The SA system had a back channel, for signalling, but it was very low data rate.
3/ to put this in context, each quadrature amplitude modulation- based "video channel" of 6MHz could carry 27MB/s of data (later 38.8Mb/s) the backchannel used different encoding (QPSK) and much less bandwidth so you only got 1 or 2 Mb/s, shared among every set top using it.
4/ millions of boxes went out, and then people started asking what else you could do on them, other than just watch TV. People tried all sorts of things. WebTV, video on demand, digital video recording, photo and music storage, home security.... yes, and games.
5/ early games on set top trials happened in the US in the period ~2001 - 2005... they used repurposed 8bit PC games downloaded into the boxes. the challenge was that the boxes were very underpowered: very little processing, bad graphics, low res. how could this be improved?
6/ several different teams figured out you could stream hi-res video into the boxes, and use the skinny backchannel for remote control keystrokes. The architecture worked in an environment with lots of "downstream" bandwidth and almost no "upstream" bandwidth.
7/ there were two main types of offerings: casual games offerings with low res graphics aimed at "game snacking", and AAA games offerings seeking to replicate gaming set top quality and experience. Active Video and G-Cluster in Europe were like the former, OnLine like the latter
8/ in 2007/8/9 iPhones hit the market and suddenly everyone had a casual gaming machine in their pocket. This impacted casual side of the market, by removing the natural "PC or Arcade" bottleneck that enabled the casual games on TV business case.
9/ there continue to this day to be services / trials of casual games on TV, but the gold rush people dreamed of in the early 2000's never materialized. Usually the casual trials were at least partly aimed at proving streaming tech to AAA publishers, to try to get them engaged.
10/ the business model is like video on demand movies: publisher takes a big %, streamer and broadband partner take a small %. there is not a lot of $ in the model overall, it is very challenging to make it work
11/ eventually OnLive folded, and a lot of the remaining value was simply their streaming patents. The owners of Active Video aggregated a lot of that; The tech they developed for games is still used to provide UX for very old / skinny backchannel cable set tops
12/ so why is Google doing this? for > 20 years, technology has been invested in and developed attempting to fulfil the original idea of sending very high q real time video to devices in home, with a skinny upstream for user feedback
13/ AAA games have a large enough revenue stream to justify the bet on this, even now, but looking forward is also important. 20 years ago when this started, nobody had a PC, consoles were new, and cost avoidance value props could enable a streaming games value prop
14/ the analog of that today is VR: who wants to wear a supercomputer on their head if they can have reality simply streamed to them over a broadband connection. Many of the same constraints and incentives exist.
15/ sometimes implementing the dreams of the past teach you how to implement the dreams of the future. Stadia appears to follow the basic architecture of the data world 20 years ago, when broadband was new and computers expensive and rare. VR looks a lot like that now.
16/ I hope this gives some context. if you have questions, please let me know. your thread was great, and made me nostalgic for the world when we did not yet know how so much of this would work out.
