Could streaming games revolutionize the gaming industry?

[CrystalShadow]

Well the Air Forces around the world use Flight Simulators (and not Microsoft versions either) which connect to different bases across the world for training, the lag (and im not joking) from Australia to America is a whopping 0.45 seconds. Sadly most houses dont have 20 Million for such Cabling.

OT: Since some Countries, Areas and Antartica have either Horrid internet, cant support ADSL 2+ (if there is a 3) and (In Antartica's Case) doesnt have real internet providers they would (like mentioned) go skimp broke in a matter of time.

Uh... 0.45 seconds? Is that a typo? Or is that supposed to sound impressive?
Way back, (1997) I played a game called 'subspace' online from Hobart and Brisbane...
My average ping for reaching one of the American servers was... Right. 450 milliseconds. And I was considered to lag quite badly.
Right now, my Cable Internet connection in the UK has pings in the region of 280 milliseconds to the US...
Keep in mind though, that for a service like this to be viable for an action game. (crysis, or even something like Super Mario) it would need to keep the lag down to no more than 100 ms, and even that is quite extreme...
Not easy, I can tell you...

In my case it's more about my monthly download quota, not my speeds. Here in Australia at least, there isn't anyone who will be able to use this effectively.

While not quite true, as some ISPs do provide an unlimited quota, that is a very small percentage in comparison to those of us who don't.
So I concur. It shan't be taking of in Australia for a very long time to come.

Yeah, and the unlimited quotas are insanely expensive. I think it's only really businesses that have them.

That's the biggest thing I miss about living in England. Decent speed unlimited broadband is very affordable over there. It was a biiig adjustment for a download whore like myself. I used to have nights where I would download nearly 20GB overnight... The number of terabytes I must have downloaded over the past few years is embarassing to think about. :|

Heh. You're telling me. I was doing a video chat with someone in Australia who thought he'd boast about his 1.5 megabit connection...

Unfortunately, my 'cheap' (as in cheapest option available) UK connection is already 2 megabits per second (and they're removing it as an option within the next month or two and shifting me to 10 megabits) - Further, I really do have unlimited downloads, Although they throttle it during peak hours, I've downloaded insane amounts of stuff overnight.
The program I use to monitor downloads has hit about 30GB in the last month or so...
Not to mention that I watched so many online videos at some point that because I left my browser open, I had about 13 Gigabytes of my hard drive occupied solely by my browser cache...

Australia has terrible broadband provisions.
And the UK is more or less considered the among worst in the developed world (which I can vouch for when I went over to visit some people in the Netherlands...)

The whole notion of this service is just totally dependent on fast broadband connections with unfeasibly low pings...

 

[stompy]

limits consumers to an embarrasing 40GB cap per month.

Christ, that's bad Internet in the States!? Are you fucking kidding me? I'm making do with 30GB a month, and my plan is one of the higher-end ones offered by my ISP...

Anyways, it might work in the US and perhaps Europe, but it definitely won't work in Oceania...

 

[Syntax Error]

As what most other people already stated:

Yes, yes it will IF it can be done.