+
20100104 - OnLive Notes
+
+
+
Notes from an OnLive Video Demonstration and Talk ...
+
+LATENCY
+=======
+They target 80ms round trip interactive latency
+ for 1000 mile range from data center.
+From rough numbers given in talk and other estimation,
+
+11 ms - Round trip of 2000 miles (speed of light).
+21 ms - Round trip, in practice.
+
+25 ms - Round trip (+DSL/Cable provider overhead).
+01 ms - Encode frame.
+08 ms - Decode frame (example from laptop).
+33 ms - Maxed out 30Hz frame in game.
+12 ms - Client side input latency and misc.
+-----
+80 ms - Total.
+
+VIDEO COMPRESSION
+=================
+About 1 ms to compress a frame: 1.5 Mbps SDTV, 5 Mbps HDTV.
+In comparison DVD maximum rate for audio+video is 10 Mbps and Blu-ray is 48 Mbps.
+The 5 Mbps seems like really low quality from the numbers alone.
+No GOP, probably just I and P without B frames.
+Comments from Dark Shikari suggests OnLive is simply splitting encoding
+ into 16 independent rectangular tiles and using H.264
+ as the method to bring encoding latency down.
+
+NETWORK ROUTING
+===============
+Problems with home internet include jitter, packet loss, reordering,
+ and routers delaying packets to check for exploits.
+They have deals with ISPs to provide direct routes on internet to minimize latency
+ and have tree structured ip-multicast to enable efficient 100K spectators
+ (1000 per multicast stream).
+
+BREAKDOWN OF TYPICAL GAME COST
+==============================
+From the talk (they also include extra costs: $12/game piracy, $12/game used game sales):
+
+$15 - Retail margin.
+$18 - Wholesale ($7 returns, $4 COGS, $7 platform royalty).
+$27 - Publisher gross margin.
+---
+$60 - Total.
+
+