HTC invest $40m in OnLive: game streaming coming to the Desire HD 2?

HTC have put a considerable investment into the game distribution and streaming service OnLive, to the sum of $40 million.

The move by the Taiwanese smartphone manufacturer has sparked rumours that the stable housing the Desire and Desire HD handsets may be planning a move into content distribution, as well as potentially upping the ante in their mobile gaming stakes.

HTC have also bought Saffron Digital, a company that specializes in streaming DRM-protected video.

While the details at this moment are slim, there’s potential here for some very interesting developments at Camp HTC. The Sense UI may soon become as much about downloading movie and music content as it is about social networking, if the expertise of these two new partners is harnessed well.

Even more exciting is the potential of console-quality gaming on their handsets. For those of you not familiar with the concept of OnLive, the company uses a farm of super-computers to process system-intensive gaming, with a player-controlled video stream of the action sent to the OnLive console or PC platform. In essence, it means that even the most of modest of gaming rigs can play high-spec games.

As it’s merely a video stream that gamers are controlling, the platform can virtually be ported to any device, so long at the internet connection is consistent and speedy. With the advent of 4G LTE data connections in smartphones, it’s by no means a far stretch of the imagination to eventually find OnLive games streamed to HTC handsets.

Hopefully we’ll hear more news on this interesting partnership at MWC next week. We certainly won’t turn our noses up at playing Crysis 2 on a smartphone should this pipedream come become a reality, that’s for sure!

Via: WSJ