Doctor Glyndwr wrote:
I have a number of 720p H.264 rips of TV shows. They are usually around 1.1-1.2 Gb and look very good to the eye. That's a bitrate of 430Kbps or a little under 4Mbit/sec. Or you could look at it this way; my domestic ADSL has, when there are good peers, grabbed them from BitTorrent at greater-than-realtime.
You're not really comparing apples with apples there, as those shows will have been compressed with multi-pass encoders that can basically take all the time in the world to get it looking as good as possible, they know what frames came before, what frames are coming in the future, and how best to transition between them with the highest image quality and lowest amount of bytes used.
On top of that, your average TV show or film doesn't 'move about' half as much as your average game does - for every action or 'lots of stuff moving about' sequence there are going to be extended periods where the image on screen doesn't change that much, which massively reduces the overall data required. Games just don't have that, or at least, they definitely don't have it in the busy bits, which is where framerate and latency need to be as high and low respectively as possible.
We're talking about real-time encoding of an entirely unpredictable player-controlled experience, that has to take its input from a remote source (the player), work out how that affects the game, encode the result, spit it back down a residential ADSL connection to the player, and then rinse wash repeat, for minutes if not hours at a time. Which planet is this supposed to be happening on?
I'm just not buying it, the backend server hardware requirements for anything like a properly scaled-up user experience boggle the mind quite frankly, and that's before you start to consider the raw consistent bandwidth requirements with minimal lag.
At least with a 'normal' game lag can be compensated for with the game effectively filling in the blanks as far as it can, since your local hardware is drawing the frames itself, but when the entire game experience is being piped down your internet connection? No way, ain't gonna happen.
I'll eat my hat if this comes to pass in any kind of mass-market sense. Then I'll buy you a hat, and I'll eat that one too.