OnLive want to avoid hardware, console market

OnLive CEO and President Steve Perlman has said he'd want to keep the company away from the hardware and console markets if possible and would prefer to see the company brought to users through other means.

OnLive's cloud-based streaming game system will be coming to the US in just a few months. The company recently announced pricing and release details, but will only have the service available through PCs at launch - the already unveiled micro-console is set to be released later on.

"The fact that we have to sell a piece of hardware for the TV, if you will, takes us out of our core business," Perlman told Joystiq. "We think the Micro-console is a cool thing, but we'd rather not have any hardware at all."

Instead, Perlman would want to bring OnLive to subscribers through a set top box.

"If it has a USB port [for the controller] and we have adequate performance in there, then it's conceivable we can do it," Perlman said. "A lot of them just have built-in latency because they assume they're using a conventional compression algorithm [for video]. In that case there's nothing we can do."

Perlman also repeated that he fully expects people to be critical of OnLive's latency issues when it first launches, especially since the service "demands the connection to be exactly what it's spec'd to be."

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