Google Streaming / Console

[Gotmadskillzson]

Quote: Originally Posted by DocHolliday

I cut the cord and only stream now. I have a 1 TB limit and have never gone over 650 gigs in any given month. We are not super heavy TV watchers, but adding this and I would assume we would fly by that in no time. I believe I saw that 1 hour of gaming at 4k/60 would chew through like 20 gigs an hour.

It's 7gigs an hour. It would be the same as watching NetFlix in 4K60, which consumes 7gigs an hour.

[pietasterp]

I'm certainly interested in the concept at play here, but I'll be more interested to see how it plays out in the real world. To this day, I don't particularly love streaming movies/shows, as the quality waxes and wanes and you get a lot of compression artifact even with high quality streams, and this is with a fiber connection. It's okay because in general it works fine, but for games, I would imagine the quirks and lapses might be more pronounced (or more maddening).

But, it's a first foray into the field, so I will watch with great interest how it works out.

[DocHolliday]

I don't think streaming a 4K movie is going to be a great comparison. Took this from another site so take it with a grain of salt, but he seems to know what he is talking about...

It's completely different. A 4K HDR Netflix stream might be efficiently encoded at 10-15Mbps, but a realtime low latency gaming stream would need 50-100Mbps to get similar quality.

Efficiently compressing VOD is done by making multiple passes through the file, using information from earlier and later frames (up to +/- 30 seconds) to find redundancies that can be coded, using the results of prior passes to find segments of video that can be encoded with fewer bits without noticeable quality loss or which need more bits to look good, and using CPU/GPU intensive compression algorithms which can operate slower than real time. It makes sense to make every effort to save every bit when the video only needs to be encoded once but the output will need to be uploaded millions of times.

Live streaming video is tougher - You can't make multiple passes through the file but usually you can tolerate some delay, often anywhere from 5 - 30 seconds, so you can still use later frames to find redundancies. You have 1 producer streaming to an audience, so there's only one stream that needs to be compressed to serve many end users, and it makes sense to throw a lot of power into that compression since multiple viewers can benefit from the results.

Real time gaming, on the other hand, means you need an encoder for every user. That practically requires using less intensive and less efficient encoders, and thus more bits are needed to encode the same quality. Games tend to have a lot of small details such as text labels, so you can't drop the quality too much. And the stream has to be encoded with extremely low latency, which means you can't look at any later frames to find redundancies, you can only look at a few past frames.

[mestevo]

Can't really debate invented, imaginary processes. Google was able to pull off Project Stream w/ as little as 30ms of apparent latency. We'll see how that scales from the alpha product.

[dickey1331]

The rumor is the service will be free and you just pay for the games.


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[mgoblue]

Quote: Originally Posted by mestevo

We cut the cord also, pay a $50 premium for no data cap, use nearly 2TB/mo as a family of 6. I don't think we're an edge case, and more ISP competition may be coming w/ the 5G rollout. Bring on the future.

I will end up more like you over time. I also use a ton when I'm downloading games to try (60GB per game sometime). I think i'm probably 600ish GB a month. We use netflix a lot during the day, but still have cable so that saves a bit from what I'd use otherwise. As kids get older they'll be streaming more otherwise.


If it's free and you just pay for games that's more realistic. No worry about keeping a subscription going to be able to play stuff you paid for, but how does that pay for the servers? All interesting questions we'll need answers to.

[dubcity]

I feel like there's little bit of irony to touting split screen local multiplayer on an entirely cloud-based online system.

The 4K/8K talk is a little iffy to me. How many live streaming video services do 4K? As in live TV type streaming, not just stored on-demand content like Netflix.

[Artman22]

My personal opinion, but I don’t see this really taking off. The idea is good, but I don’t we’re here yet. I could be wrong but that’s my opinion. The lag has to be very minimum and while this will supposedly be 4k it’ll be highly compressed which will be lesser quality. We’ll have to wait and see.


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