Survey: How Much Would You Pay For High Quality Streaming of SL on Browsers, Phones, and Tablets?

How much would you pay to stream Second Life from the cloud, if that removed most of the lag and loading problems associated with SL now, and you could get a quality SL experience on, say, your iPad, or a cheap old laptop? I've been wondering about this question in recent months, for at least two reasons: For one, leading cloud service OnLive just announced they'd start streaming on tablets and phones. For another, an insider recently told me why Linden Lab's experiment in cloud streaming Second Life last year (with Gaikai, to much acclaim), was discontinued: Too costly per user to be worthwhile. But it would probably not be too costly, if there was a market for paying for it as a subscription service -- hence, this week's survey question:

Online Surveys & Market Research

These options, I should say, aren't the only feasible price points, just several plausible scenarios. My real focus is to discern a market for cloud streaming SL, if the not-insubstantial price of streaming was passed on to the consumer.

Please choose one option, and encourage your SL friends to come by and do so too. Results soon!

Comments

[foneco zuzu]

well considering that i bought a Usd 3000 computer, pay Usd 150 month for a 200mega optical fiber connection, plus premium membership and 37000 l for tiers, if World economics weren't as instable as now, i would pay Usd 40 without a sec thought!
But on these troubled times, i'll not risk to pay a single L more and if prizes on Sl will not drop, probably will have to spent a lot less.
This is only my personal opinion!

[Ezra]

Those example prices are all ridiculous.

OnLive is $10 a month for unlimited play. Not of every game but certainly some more graphically intensive than Second Life. And certainly OnLive owes royalties out of those $10 a month subscriptions whereas Linden Lab would owe no one.

I think a better survey would've been

1. $10 dollars a month for unlimited use.
2. As apart of premium.
3. Not interested.

With the prices and usage you proposed though I couldn't help but answer 'not interested' even though I wouldn't mind cloud rendering as an option at a reasonable price point.

[Seymore Steamweaver]

I went with $2 a month. I was part of the streaming beta last year. I was on my dog of a laptop (averaged 15fps with settings on low under normal use) and I was completely floored by the performance.

I'm on a much faster computer now, but don't really need an all out immersive experience when I'm just chatting with some friends, by myself on a sandbox or answering customer IM's. Tiered pricing based on performance needs would be rad. Burning man streamed would have been sick.

[Ann Otoole InSL]

I pay LL tier at LL's tier prices. Why should I pay more? What is wrong with people thinking it is OK to pay LL tier and then also pay for a developer to fix things (and then they simply say sorry delayed indefinitely and keep the money) and then suggest people pay to have SL streamed too?

Sorry. Not going to work at all. Ever.

[sirhc desantis]

Well with the latest FS on my very battered and battle scarred 2007 laptop (ok so with a very light OS duct taped on) giving me more than adequate performance for general tootling around (chatting, building, scripting, bit of biz, the odd video clip - you know, the usual) and having no plans for any tablet or phone for the next decade then - you missed the pricepoint for me, which is where they pay me to up their nummbers :)

[Arcadia Codesmith]

I might drop $10 a month for unlimited access to ALL my MMO and VW subscriptions, with preference for a flat $200 lifetime rate.

Or I might bite at a SL Premium Plus package at $15/month or so that included streaming as a perk along with a nice estate plot, modest market stall and other benefits.

I'd also like a cherry '64 Caddy ragtop in dusty rose, and I'm prepared to spend up to $50.

[DBDigital Epsilon]

Hamlet,
Actually SL IS streamed. Not by a third party service that is true. But because your question is a bit deceptive as currently stated it is hard to answer.

A better way to ask it would be "would you pay more to have a faster SL connection and more responsive?" Some might say yes, however I tend to agree with Ann, LL should be doing that already for what we pay in high teir fees. And I don't think a 3rd party system is going to help the situation for the simple reason that it is still LL's servers and network at the core and that is likely the problem. Adding another layer is likely not going to improve the situation (unless that layer gets LL to change the framework and system radically).

Other games were mentioned, but you see those are 'Games' where the content does not change radically from minute to minute like it does in SL. A 3rd party streaming system will work for those but not SL. It is really comparing apples to oranges.

Or saying "would you pay more to have this orange taste like this apple?" A interesting idea but the point is moot regardless.

[Adeon Writer]

In addition to LL's fees, you would also need an unlimited / flat fee cellular data plan that includes heavy videostreaming..

While I'd love the ability, I just can't imagine the price of the service being low enough for me to justify having it. I'd be willing to pay at most 10 usd on top of regular primiem fees, but the cellular plan from my carrier makes it a no deal.

I'd prefer to see an SL viewer running natively on a tablet.

[shockwave yareach]

If my computer can't run the viewer, then I don't need SL on it. If LL cannot make a viewer that works merely okay on the intel video chips, then LL has the problem and not me. Me, I buy computers with good graphics cards because I like to play in SL. But I accept the limitations of playing on poorer hardware when I run on poorer hardware. If LL wants people with cheaper hardware to be able to run SL, they need to make the viewer able to run in limited fashion on the Intel graphics that every cheap computer has builtin. Come on, how hard can a translator function to convert openGL calls to whatever Intel uses be? If you want to open SL up to poorer computers, you're gonna have to have a viewer that works on the graphics it has built in.

I really doubt ATT is going to give me the bitrate I need to stream to my phone over their network. Sorry, but the only cases I would need streaming would be cases where I already know it won't work.

[EhrmanDigfoot]

$10 per month, preferably with Onlive, the Gaikai experiment was buggy and I don't think they have the resources to pull it off.

[jo yardley]

I don't have a tablet, I don't have a mobile phone and my laptop isn't used outside the home.
So I have little use for this.

BUT I think that streaming SL trough an internet browser would be a great thing and would bring many thousands of new and old users (back) to SL.
So it is in SL own best interest to make the SL browser version either free or very cheap.
People finally enjoying SL without much lag on average computers will start spending money in SL anyway.

[Shug Maitland]

I gave a hypothetical answer, I have a high end gaming desktop with a better than average internet connection. There are many ppl though who run SL with a laptop and wireless connection.
I was quite impressed by the experiment though. Putting the viewer on a server and streaming the resulting graphics as a video is worth pricing. I think it is a product that would sell, not for everyone, but for enough to make it worthwhile if it was done well and priced right.

[Dartagan Shepherd]

Not sure how this applies?

Second Life is basically a free-play model. If anything resembling these prices were implemented, the only users left would be those who already have money to pay an overpriced tier.

Which would leave SL with a fraction of its userbase overnight.

In the face of light-weight free-play, mobile and web based offerings, these kind of costs don't hold up.

Imagine this were a public offering. Smart money and analysts would be far less kind than they were with Zynga, in either its current or web-streamed form.

[Arcadia Codesmith]

It's an add-on fee for a premium service. Instead of the client rendering the world, it's rendered by a high-powered machine at the server end (or in the "cloud") and pushed to you as streaming video.

It's most useful to people who have fantastic bandwidth but mediocre graphics capability. Most portables fall into this category, but it would also be good for people with older desktops and not enough cash to upgrade the graphics card... IF the price was within their means.

But at the rates proposed, I'm afraid you're targeting a very small niche.

[roblem hogarth]

Ok #1 and before I vote, you all have to understand this blogs readership is likely 90% developers/Designers/Long term invested in SL. From profiling posters I could prove 50% easy. So you can bet "not interessted..." is going to be high.

#2 I like the Premium service missing option. I pay over $8000US a year to "make a living in SL" Even doubling what we pay for premium for Android (sorry doesn't everyone have an i-whatever, no we don't) or other rendered access that you could get to with a Roku, x-box, playstation, PSP or other device that can't get to SL now would be worth it.

#3 beyond missing the Premium option, your pricing options are crazy. Hardly anyone in SL now is going to go for prices like that and you are never going to get anyone new in at these prices.

#4 Unless you have the inside track as to how much a "cloud service" would cost where are you coming up with these numbers? 2$ an hour to unlimited? What 365 days 40 hours? for less than 1/2 a penny an hour?

It's an interesting concept, I think it would help a lot.

[roblem hogarth]

heh 66% don't like any of your options, shocker! I just can't imagine a flat Premium option or a sponcered option wouldn't work.

[Dartagan Shepherd]

Oy, must stop thinking about this.

So people that can't afford the hardware to run a heavy client get the heavy client and people that can afford the hardware get the light client.

Or people that can't afford the hardware, but can afford the monthly fee pay more in 6-12 months than it'd cost them to afford the hardware.

The latter group being most likely to go *poof* on a faster curve.

I think my calculator just had a nervous breakdown.

EA has been known to have each game team building a completely different engine for various titles.

We have one team here with the task of making an in-house system lighter and more up to date. At $75 million in profit, I'd be gambling on being able to buy the talent to make that happen, rather than adding on more layers of complexity.

Flashbacks of all those old news articles about Second Life ... "Don't worry, it'll scale".

http://news.cnet.com/Second-Life-Dont-worry,-we-can-scale/2100-1043_3-6080186.html

http://www.zdnet.com/news/second-life-dont-worry-we-can-scale/148320

[iskye silverweb]

And who defines what a "quality experience" is? I don't get that from squinting at a tiny screen. How is that 'immersive'?

Not interested.

[Robert]

No way to any of those prices.

[Hamlet Au]

"I don't get that from squinting at a tiny screen."

That's a thumbnail. Read the link about Gaikai, and read the reader comments.

[Maria Korolov]

Hamlet --

Unity 3D now has an exporter to Flash (demo here: http://www.tipodean.com/converter/unity3d-flash-demo.html)

Tipodean also has a very basic Unity viewer for OpenSim/Second Life. But there are some excellent Unity viewers for other platforms, and a pretty decent WebGL one for Sirikata (http://www.sirikata.com/blog/).

So, with current technology, it's possible to have a Web-based viewer for a virtual environment that will run on any device (tablets included) -- and at no additional cost to the user.

Why hasn't Linden Lab released one?

What I keep hearing is that they don't have the back-end infrastructure and scalability to support the likely steep increase in traffic that would bring.

But if you buy into that, you'd have to realize that any Web viewer for OpenSim would also be able to access Second Life -- and that the Lindens must be running around stamping out any such project before it gets off the ground.

On the other hand... Tipodean did suspiciously stop further work on their viewer last spring...

(Of course, a more likely explanation is that they just ran out of money and switched to working on projects with immediate cash flow in the mean time.)

[Hamlet Au]

Yes, that's a more likely explanation, though I haven't talked with Tipodean in awhile.

I'm bearish on deploying SL on the web with Unity. I believe you'd still need a high quality 3D card, and the quality will still take a hit. If SL is gonna go on the web (and tablets), I think it's better to do it with the best experience possible.

[Aeonix Aeon]

Streaming Second Life via the cloud is a business model that Linden Lab should not get themselves into.

It is an unsustainable model in the long run, and very costly. That isn't because it cannot be accomplished, but because you're offloading far more processing and bandwidth onto a centralized architecture back-end than you normally would be.

It works for gaming services like OnLive! because those games all have a fixed size (static content) and that can be managed against cost to deploy on a cloud system. Second Life is a dynamic content environment and thus cannot be given a static cost of deployment that is satisfactory to the end-user.

I'm aware of things such as Kitely, and I worry about them for the same reasons. Bandwidth streaming far exceeds what a mobile provider would allow over time. 1GB per hour would exceed a mobile bandwidth limit within an hour or two for the *month*.

So no, I'm not interested in streaming Second Life from the cloud. At least, not in that manner. It's completely possible to pull it off and circumvent that 1GB per hour streaming issue, but I'm not saying how at this time.

[elizabeth (16)]

$10 a month if i got a 1024m land as well

if not get land as well then not get

[Graham Mills]

I thought the Tipodean viewer was done by IBM and licensed by Tipodean -- I don't know how much further development is being done by either but I imagine the issues are more of a strategic nature for IBM.

[Geo Meek]

Try posing the question in a way that makes sense and cents....

[Dale Innis]

I -almost- said 10$/month for up to 30 hours, for the chance to get into SL from my iPad. But that's still another $120/yr, and I don't think I could bring myself to right now.

(On the speculation that it's possible now on tablets with no additional cost: I don't think so! Having the viewer be "WebGL" or "in-browser" doesn't magically increase the rendering power of the tablet. The calculation still has to be done somewhere...)

[Wol Euler]

My problem with this is that I simply do not believe that moving from a Lab-owned server in the internet to a cloud-provider-owned server in the internet would improve lag. Internet is internet. SL lags because the data is not stored on my computer's HD, the cloud does not change that.

Would I like a version of SL to run on the iPad? Sure.

[Pussycat Catnap]

All the cellphone companies in the USA are starting to cap people's 3g and 4g service at 1gb/month (gasp), and then charge an arm and a leg by the byte you go over...

So streaming anything on a portable device is going to be dead in the water in the USA. Once you move more than 20-feet from that Starbucks WiFi router and switch to whatever-g, you might as well sign over your mortgage...

So there's no rate I'd be willing to pay for this, until somebody smacks the cellphone providers upside the head and takes away a few hundred million from their CEO's salary instead of extorting us 99%ers...