OnLive Claims Long-Delayed Patent is Pivotal
Tech entrepreneur Steve Perlman has his name on more than 100 U.S. patents. He is particularly excited about his latest, but miffed at the same time.
His company, OnLive, has pioneered the concept of running fast-action videogames over the Internet without the need for users to own a gaming console or a PC with a fancy graphics card. The software runs on servers OnLive maintains “in the cloud,” as people like to say in Silicon Valley. Those machines handle the chore of rendering sophisticated gaming images and compress them so they can be delivered to any computer with a Web browser, or to an HDTV equipped with a small add-on device OnLive sells.
On Tuesday, OnLive announced that it had received what Perlman says is a fundamental patent that covers that concept. Among other things, claims of the patent discuss a video game server executing a “high twitch-action” videogame, a compression unit, a transceiver to transmit compressed game video to one or more players located over a remote distance.
“This is an industry-changing patent,” Perlman says.
What irks him is that it took eight years to receive it.
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Also, view coverage of Steve Perlman demoing OnLive’s capabilities from last week at D: Dive Into Mobile and from last June at D8.
