Bijan Sabet

Congrats to Steve Perlman & OnLive

I had the pleasure of working for my friend Steve Perlman twice in my life. In both cases it was an incredible experience and I learned a ton from him directly that I’ve taken with me. I owe him a lot actually.

When it comes to his professional life, there are three things to know about Steve. He loves huge ideas. He is master of the stealth (here’s the original website to Artemis Research which was the stealth name for WebTV in the early days). And he is focused like a laser on the consumer.

His latest company is called OnLive. The service brings “cloud gaming” which delivers any game to any PC, Mac or TV. The big breakthrough here is that Steve and his team have solved major scaling, compression and latency requirements to essentially stream console and high end games to practically any device. So you can use any PC or Mac - not just a computers with high end graphics cards. And you don’t need a PS3 or Xbox or any other console to play either.

That’s a huge idea. The current game console life cycle from Sony and Micrsoft every number of years is always problematic. As a developer its very hard to deal with new platforms and its very expensive. It’s also expensive for users as well. And your choice of titles depends on which console you buy.

Also putting these games in the cloud means new type of game play and other things that I’m sure Steve is working on.

Steve showed me an early functioning prototype of the technology a few years back at his home. It was amazing.

Tonight full details will be available to everyone but the story broke so can read more about it on VentureBeat.

Congrats to Steve & OnLive.