The ”extremely important” British market will get to experience OnLive thanks to telecom firm BT, the ”ideal UK partner.” Plans will arrive later.
The service of OnLive will be bundled with BT’s broadband packages. This deal landed the UK telecom giant 2.6 percent share holding of the cloud-platform company. OnLive wants to extend to Europe in time but the first stop is the UK.
”Entertainment is going to be at the heart of what we offer customers in the future,” said BT boss Gavin Patterson, reports Eurogamer. ”It’s great for our customers - they’ll have access to a huge catalogue of games, available instantly on their TV or PC without expensive hardware.” Specific plans for this venture will be announced ”later this year.”
Steve Perlman of OnLive: ”The UK market is extremely important to OnLive and our video game publishing partners as we expand into Europe. We view BT as the ideal UK partner.”
The service of OnLive works by needing the client to have a super fast broadband connection to a PC, as streaming feeds of games they want to play are beamed from very beefy servers that handle all the hardware headaches remotely.
The cloud-platform eliminates the need for gamers to spend mega bucks on high-end PCs, providing of course your Internet is strong. OnLive server hubs will need to spring up in the UK to support the infrastructure; otherwise it will all fall apart.
BT must have made quite the offer to OnLive as the UK’s ‘best’ broadband ISP is their rival Virgin Media, who offer fibre optic cable connections with 50Mbps Internet - and plan on expanding that to 100Mbps eventually.
