Streaming SL

[Jennifer Boyle]

Some years ago there was a service (operated by Sony, I think) that allowed games to be run on servers and the video streamed to users. Second Life was on it; the viewer ran on a server. The advantage was that, since the viewer didn't need to run on the local machine, which just needed to display video, low-powered devices could be used to access Second Life. The service was discontinued by its owner for unrelated reasons.

I wonder why LL does not do something similar itself to make SL accessible to  larger audience. People could use smartphones and tablets as well as low-powered computers. Surely, having SL accessible to many more people would be a big plus for LL.

[Ardy Lay]

I would imagine economics would weigh in heavily.  How much are people going to pay to run SL Viewer?

[LittleMe Jewell]

There was a company called Bright Canopy that did this for a few years, but they shut down in Jan of this year.  I used them a couple of times when I traveled and just wanted to pop iinworld a short bit each day.  I do not remember their exact pricing, but since it was hourly based, it wasn't cheap - at least not if you spent lots of hours inworld every day.

[Arielle Popstar]

1 hour ago, Jennifer Boyle said:

I wonder why LL does not do something similar itself to make SL accessible to  larger audience. People could use smartphones and tablets as well as low-powered computers. Surely, having SL accessible to many more people would be a big plus for LL.

You would think so but the Lab does not seem to "think" like that. Perhaps once they are fully uploaded into the cloud they would be able to handle an increased concurrency but so far they seem determined to scuttle any opportunities to grow S/L as a whole.

[animats]

Streaming gaming is a great idea that currently costs too much.

There are services such as Shadow, which rents you a rackmount PC in a data center, which you then control from a remote desktop client. Clients are available for desktops and and phones. You can run whatever you want. Costs about $12/month for a basic gamer PC, about $30/month for a really good one. Unclear what happens if you stay logged in 24/7. They used to charge more, but then NVidia and Google got into the business and forced the price point down. But those won't run SL.

There are many other streaming game services, but most of them come with a list of games you can run. Shadow just gives you a bare Windows 10 PC, so installs are your problem. Because your machine is in a data center, it has lots of bandwidth to and from SL's servers. Ideally, you'd like to have game streaming from the same data center that hosts the SL servers. Asset loading could be really fast.

If the Shadow "Subscribe" button produced more than a blank page and lots of web console errors, it might be interesting to try. A few other companies have offered similar services, but didn't stay in business. This one may be having problems too. Not sure this business model works. $12 a month is a very low rate for a full time computer in a data center; the going rate for a dedicated server is $75-$150.

NVidia and Google have similar offerings, but they only work for specific games. SL would have to cut a deal with them to get a viewer onto their platform, and maybe give them a cut of revenue.

[Amanda Starlight]

second life is working with Amazon now. wondering if LL could use the new streaming service form Amazon "Luna" and have a virtual viewer or a channel that could let us stream sl?! that would be amazing! hey even if they made it a premium plus type of subscription!

[Extrude Ragu]

When most people think about streaming SL they seem to think about from some data center in the cloud to a (possibly low cost) mobile device, presumably with the intention of being able to sit on the couch with their phone or tablet and see the 3d world and talk to people.

If all we want to do is play SL on the couch, why not just put some streaming ability into the viewer, and a mobile app that simply receives a stream of the 3d view from your computer, has some basic finger friendly controls. It'd be much less expensive, and you wouldn't even have to log out of your computer, you could just leave SL running, walk over to your couch, take your phone out and continue doing whatever you were doing

[Arielle Popstar]

1 hour ago, Extrude Ragu said:

When most people think about streaming SL they seem to think about from some data center in the cloud to a (possibly low cost) mobile device, presumably with the intention of being able to sit on the couch with their phone or tablet and see the 3d world and talk to people.

If all we want to do is play SL on the couch, why not just put some streaming ability into the viewer, and a mobile app that simply receives a stream of the 3d view from your computer, has some basic finger friendly controls. It'd be much less expensive, and you wouldn't even have to log out of your computer, you could just leave SL running, walk over to your couch, take your phone out and continue doing whatever you were doing

Problem as i see it is twofold. 1 you still need a desktop/laptop capable of running S/L well in addition to a reasonably good tablet or phone. The second problem is that the viewer UI being setup for a larger screen size, would not work so well when viewed on a 6 inch phone or even 10 inch tablet. A native app with a UI designed specifically for a phone or tablet would be much nicer.

 

[Extrude Ragu]

1 hour ago, Arielle Popstar said:

Problem as i see it is twofold. 1 you still need a desktop/laptop capable of running S/L well in addition to a reasonably good tablet or phone

I am not advocating this  as a solution for people who can't afford a computer. The sort of people who can't afford a computer can't afford a fast enough internet connection to live stream SecondLife and own a subscription either.

What I'm advocating it for is your existing SecondLife player who does own a computer and simply wants to be able to walk away from their computer with SL running, and view it on their phone. The viewers 3d view minus all UI elements are sent to the mobile. The mobile app is simply showing a video of whatever is on the 3d view of the computer, and drawing some finger friendly buttons over it to chat, move around etc. It'd all be over the local network on wifi, so lag wouldn't be an issue, it's not too difficult to implement either

[GoSpeed Racer]

Was it OnLive?  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OnLive

[Jennifer Boyle]

On 11/24/2020 at 10:04 PM, animats said:

Streaming gaming is a great idea that currently costs too much....

...the going rate for a dedicated server is $75-$150.

$150 per month works out to less than $0.25 per hour, so someone should be able to turn a nice profit by charging, e.g., $0.50 per hour, which isn't prohibitively expensive at all.

[Jennifer Boyle]

16 hours ago, GoSpeed Racer said:

Was it OnLive?  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OnLive

Yes, that's what I was thinking of. I tried it just to see how it worked, and I thought it worked OK.

[Ceka Cianci]

I used Onlive back then.. I had already had it for other things before SL was on there.. I really hated when it stopped on there.. Things ran so smooth on it..