I know that I have said it in the past, but I am not big on cloud streaming services. For art, the ability to genuinely own your content keeps it safe from censorship and licensing disagreements. You only need to look back a year to see Disney pulling access to legally purchased content on Amazon because they wanted their TV channel to have exclusive rights to the Christmas movies in the holiday season. This does not apply to people who actually owned the content (semi-)DRM-free. Streaming services, especially for video games, are examples of perfection for anyone willing to abuse the system.
Remember: If you build it, the abuse will come.
With that commentary out of the way, what streaming services are good at is pure entertainment. They are just about peak convenience to deliver… some form of entertaining content… unless you have spotty internet (or some other exception). These services have definite merit, so long as they augment platforms for actual art and not attempt to replace them.
So why am I rambling? Recently, Sony has announced that PlayStation Now will arrive for Samsung Smart TVs alongside Sony devices. At first, this might sound surprising. Sony, a console manufacturer, is providing access to the PlayStation ecosystem on other platforms – and yes, that is noteworthy. It is also not without precedent. While the initiative is mostly abandoned, Sony tried opening up to third-party mobile manufacturers (HTC, Sharp, Fujitsu, Wikipad, and Alcatel) with “PlayStation Certified”.
There is also a second reason why this is not too surprising: Samsung and Sony are fairly close partners in TV technology. Until just a few years ago, Sony LCD TV panels were manufactured by S-LCD, until Samsung eventually bought out Sony's interest in the company. The two companies are not really hostile in the TV market. If we see Sony open up PlayStation Now to LG Electronics, then I will scratch my head.
While announced ahead of CES, PlayStation Now is expected to be present at the show on Samsung TVs.
This is a really good move on
This is a really good move on Sony’s part since it allows for an infinite attach rate of software and peripherals. No console margin to worry about, just backend bandwidth and processing power that they would have to have anyway.
I agree though, DRM/UELA ruins it all for me.
The money in console gaming
The money in console gaming has always been in the software and accessories, the hardware is just an enabler. If Sony can open up PS Now across a wider number of devices then it widens the potential audience for their software. From what I’ve heard about PS Now it runs pretty well, the pricing is expensive though but hopefully that’ll change.
SO……they are going to put
SO……they are going to put a ps4 in a tv?
I’m sorry, I’m confused by
I’m sorry, I’m confused by this whole thing, what is “PlayStation now”?
It’s a videogame streaming
It’s a videogame streaming service, like OnLive tried to do. You pay a monthly fee and can play PS3/PS4 games over the internet without a console.
No one supported OnLive because they all (Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, Valve, NVIDIA, Amazon, etc.) all want to offer up their own competing streaming services. It’s only a matter of time before every publisher just has their own service like Origin and all games are stream-only. No more mods, hacks, cheats, texture packs… forget about it.
latency is a b*tch.
client
latency is a b*tch.
client server is always better for this no matter how bad their pockets want to catch on fire with your money!
yea don’t worry about it
yea don’t worry about it then, i think its that cheezeball handheld streaming thing / app.