I’ve been talking about the Internet being the convergence of all things entertainment, communication and information for a long time now. Recently the entertainment genre got a whole lot more interesting with OnLive. OnLive is a company that rabid gamers heard about earlier this year at the Game Developers Conference. They are essentially an online/on demand service for gaming that has been seven years in the making. You can log in to the service and play high performance games (think Halo). This is all possible no matter how old your computer is, as long as your connection is broadband. The company was founded by the Steve Perlman, the man behind WebTV and Quicktime.
This is an important element to the continuing online convergence and this technology will surely give rise to different business models. It’s easy to imagine a business focusing on the overlap between gaming and movies or gaming and information. One examples is:
Someone is watching a film on Hulu and a marker comes up on the screen, indicating that the user can play a short game featuring the actors to get the actors in the movie to the next scene
I’m not much of a gamer these days, but the thought of Unreal Tournament on-demand makes my thumbs sore just thinking about it.
