Perlman: OnLive to launch this winter
New funds power the cloud dream.
Steve Perlman's dreams of a "formal" winter launch for his ambitious cloud-computing company OnLive may be realised, as the latest round of fund-raising proves a huge success.
Some of America's biggest companies - phone giant AT&T, Lauder Partners and Warner Bros. - all backed the remote-gaming service, according to VentureBeat, moving Perlman closer to his rumoured $750m valuation goal.
Perlman's idea - that giant servers can power PC games for people to control remotely - requires an immense hardware infrastructure to work. That's not cheap, as Eurogamer's Digital Foundry blog pointed out.
"Over the last decade, we've seen an enormous upheaval in the media business as the written word, photos, music, and video have been steadily moving away from physical media to online delivery," said Perlman.
"One major category that still remains largely based on physical discs is fast-response interactive media - in particular, video games. And, of course, OnLive's goal is to enable that last remaining transition."
EA chief creative officer Rich Hilleman is apparently a "big believer" and OnLive has game publishers already pledging support.
The appearance of challengers like David Perry's Gaikai - admittedly different under the surface - validate the basic idea, Perlman believes.
OnLive is currently in beta but, if these claims are valid, we'll be using the service for ourselves before long.