The OnLive gaming service was recently announced at the Game Developer's Conference. Developed over seven years, the broadband service promises to offer a variety of game choices to subscribers by handling the each game's video and audio on remote servers and streaming the results to players. The service is compatible with Mac and Windows based machines, or without a machine at all through the use of a "micro console" attachment which connects directly to a television.

From Gamasutra:

What's most important though, says OnLive founder and CEO Steve Perlman and COO Mike McGarvey, is that the system works with any standard PC game, and does not require developers to code for a proprietary system.

"What OnLive does is seamless and completely transparent, and it does not have any requirements for the local system."

OnLive's service, which is planned to combine a relatively low monthly subscription fee with other per-game business models not yet fully determined, requires only a one-megabyte download to a computer, or a small plastic dongle (called a "micro-console") to connect to a TV; no GPU is required.

Once subscribed, users will be able to run any of the service's games, regardless of system requirements -- Gamasutra was able to try the system out with graphical powerhouses like Crytek's Crysis and Codemasters' GRID.

A number of major publishers including Electronic Arts, Ubisoft, Warner Bros., Take-Two, Eidos, and Atari have already signed on. And the company has announced a partnership with Epic Games that will see the Unreal Engine 3 easily adapt to OnLive's APIs.

"Not only have we solved the problem of compressing the video games, we've solved the latency problem," Perlman said to Gamasutra. "We knew, in order to make this thing work, we'd have to figure out a way to get video to run compressed over consumer connections with effectively no latency. Our video compression technology has one millisecond in latency -- basically no latency at all. All the latency is just for the transport, and we've also addressed that."

OnLive

Macworld: OnLive Service For Macs, PCs

Gamasutra: OnLive Announced

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