Current TVs not good enough for Gaikai

David Perry, founder and CEO of Gaikai, has admitted that current TVs are not suitable for his company's cloud gaming platform because of in-built input latency.
Last month Gaikai announced a deal with LG that would see its service built in to the South Korean electronics firm's Cinema 3D range of Smart TVs, beginning with models produced this year. In an interview, however, Perry tells us that TVs won't be up to the job until next year.
"Televisions are not designed to be fast," he tells us. "The signal comes in and it's moving from board to board internally before it hits the screen with around 70 to 90 milliseconds of delay.
"At Gaikai, we're constantly battling latency. It's been my objective to build the fastest network ever. So when you suddenly get 90ms in the TV architecture, that's a big problem.
"But imagine a TV manufacturer totally gets into bed with us and gives us a direct link from our ethernet port to the screen. They would have to make modifications to their circuitry but say they plan that for the 2013 TVs.
"It's going to get to the point where the consumer won't be able to tell if it's going through the internet or TV. 2013 is my prediction for when we won't be able to distinguish between a streamed and a console version of a game."
Rather than being specific to LG, Perry believes latency is a problem all TV manufacturers are currently working on, and that cloud gaming will soon become a TV standard. "Every major brand will soon sell televisions with cloud-gaming services in-built," he says. "I haven't spoken to a single major TV brand that isn't in some process of deciding to do this."
Perry's comments are extracts from an interview in our new issue,E238, which should be with subscribers any day now and will be on shelves on February 14.

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