OnLive's Perlman would rather stay out of the hardware business

by Xav de Matos { Mar 14th 2010 at 8:00PM }

In an interview with Joystiq during the 2010 Game Developers Conference, OnLive president and CEO Steve Perlman said he'd prefer not to sell any kind of hardware for his company's upcoming streaming game service. "The fact that we have to sell a piece of hardware for the TV, if you will, takes us out of our core business." While OnLive will launch as a computer application on PC and Mac this summer, the company is also currently beta testing the OnLive Micro-console for use on televisions. "We think the Micro-console is a cool thing, but we'd rather not have any hardware at all," Perlman said.

Ideally, Perlman would like the OnLive service to be added to set top boxes -- including adding the service to existing boxes via software update. "If it has a USB port [for the controller] and we have adequate performance in there, then it's conceivable we can do it," Perlman told Joystiq. "A lot of them just have built-in latency because they assume they're using a conventional compression algorithm [for video]. In that case there's nothing we can do."

Perlman echoed previous statements, saying that he expects OnLive to be "scrutinized" for any latency issues that may arise, especially considering OnLive is unique in that it "demands the connection to be exactly what it's spec'd to be." We'll certainly find out when it arrives this June.


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