t5 labs announced Friday details of a new “instant gaming” platform that enables people to play PC games via terrestrial set-top-boxes (STBs).


According to t5 labs, the “virtual games console” will enable consumers to play console-quality games with nothing to install or download.

Cable TV and IPTV (TV over broadband) operators will run standard PC games and t5 labs software on central servers. The software will allow PC titles to be streamed seamlessly to living rooms on an on-demand basis, either using a pay-to-play or subscription model, and will enable network operators to re-use their existing infrastructure to add video games to their offerings.

t5 labs believes that ease of use and access will allow publishers to reach out to new audiences using a standard platform where games are impossible to pirate and for which there is no second-hand market.

Graham Clemie, founder and CEO of t5 labs, insisted that latency would not be an issue with the service.

“Many people already enjoy playing online games. In some ways, latency with Instant Gaming will be less. Instead of connecting across the public Internet to perhaps the sole server in a country, in our case, the service will effectively be run over a private network, owned and operated by network operators and hosted at several sites across each country. The physical distance will be far lower and the operator can optimise their routers to prioritise the Instant Gaming traffic.

“Most importantly, our patent-pending technology vastly accelerates the compression process. This works by intercepting commands issued by the games software and exploiting the resulting knowledge of the objects on a screen and how they move. This can result in a 50% to 80% reduction in processing time.”

The announcement was well received by Blitz CEO Philip Oliver. "I've been at the forefront of the gaming industry for almost 25 years and there are very few occasions that I've seen something truly ground-breaking,” he said. “When I heard what t5 labs were offering I was understandably skeptical, but on learning more I became incredibly excited by the potential of this technology to revolutionize and broaden the gaming market."



News-Source: Next-Gen