We see this again and again. The cynic in me sees Stadia as yet another internal promotion scheme, masquerading as a product.
I doubt this will ever change. The internal momentum of the company culture will make it so. What does it mean for investors? Google has enough money they can just buy their way into markets indefinitely. It will probably keep them going, but I don't expect huge growth. I'd probably be putting my money into other stocks if I had to choose. I honestly don't think people would miss Google much if it was gone.
"We have some of the best cloud engineers in the world, we have one of the biggest fleets of data centers. Not a lot of companies could reasonably implement cloud gaming, but I bet we could!"
That part is true! But then:
"Productization? Pricing? Market-fit? Customer service and messaging? Whatever, we've got good tech, it'll sell itself. We can figure all that other stuff out later, that's the easy part."
...cue the flop. It was always going to be this way.
I’m quickly approaching 40, and I would like nothing more to not have to own the windows desktop that I only use for one thing. To play blood bowl 2 (and eventually 3) a few times a week. If I could do that from a browser on my MacBook, you can bet I’d never own another desktop in this life.
That’s anecdotal or course, but there’s quite a lot of us.
This is an honest question, since I don't game much (witcher 3, death stranding and a few point and click) , and regular 1080 doesn't bother me, so I'm genuinely curious.
And It is weird how resolutions are the focus in streaming when the most important thing is bitrate, feel like we need some kind of standard, because bitrate means nothing to most people.
Yep. I see a good example of this when I watch gameplay videos on Youtube in the highest available 1080p bitrate, and regularly see results that look far worse than playing the game in 720p, maybe even 480p. For example, it's obviously very common to pan the camera through a high-detail scene, which is trivial for a GPU to do, but incredibly information dense for a video encoder. So anything with a lot of detail blurs (in a very ugly way, not like motion blur) when there's movement.
And Youtube has the advantage that the video has as much time to record as Youtube will allow it, it doesn't need to be done with low-latency settings as Stadia does.
Of course, cable TV is even worse, but ordinary consumers don't seem to have noticed or cared about that either.
> Of course, cable TV is even worse, but ordinary consumers don't seem to have noticed or cared about that either.
According to Wikipedia, a DVB-C stream can be between 6-65 Mb/s [1], certainly higher than YouTube's 3-9 Mb/s (assuming 1080p video). The situation for resolutions above 1080p seems to be a bit better [2].
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVB-C
[2] https://www.androidauthority.com/how-much-data-does-youtube-...
I plugged in my cable box for the first time in months to watch the Super Bowl, and was shocked at how terrible the video was. I could see obvious artifacts without glasses on, and I can't even tell 720p from 1080p at that distance. Some of my relatives have those MPEG-2 channels, and I remember them being significantly worse.
Not trying to say that cable TV can never be better than Youtube's quality, of course, just trying to give a general impression of my experience with various American cable companies.
Actually, out of curiosity I just looked up the bitrates for my local cable company. The quality seems to differ a lot: on average between 3 Mb/s MPEG-2 [1] and 12 Mb/s MPEG-4 [2]. So I guess my previous statement isn't really accurate and it depends on the channel.
That website appears to be quite interesting btw; it also tracks YouTube bitrates for live and non-live video and in different encodings! [3]
[1] https://www.digitalbitrate.com/dtv.php?mux=C049&pid=19126&li...
[2] https://www.digitalbitrate.com/dtv.php?mux=C049&pid=19130&li...
[3] https://www.digitalbitrate.com/dtv.php?lang=en&liste=2&live=...