Steve Perlman, founder and CEO of OnLive, recently announced that the streaming game service has entered open beta testing. Some of those who signed up previously on the official website will now have the opportunity to test the service. In the blog post announcement Perlman also encouraged those who have not yet done so to sign up for a chance to beta test.

OnLive is a broadband service which promises to offer a variety of game choices to subscribers by handling each game's video and audio on remote servers and streaming the results to players. The service is compatible with Mac and Windows based machines, or without a machine at all through the use of a "micro console" attachment connected directly to a television.

One of the key challenges that OnLive technology addresses is providing a high-quality, fast-response gaming experience over a wide range of situations: different speeds/locations/types of broadband services, a variety of different PC and Mac configurations, several kinds of input and display devices, etc. So, a major focus of OnLive Beta is to test as many of these different situations as we can.

When you sign up for OnLive Beta, you tell us some general information about your ISP, your computer configuration and your location. We use this information to organize Beta testers into test groups so that our engineering team can focus at different times on testing different situations. If you are a potential fit for a particular test group, we’ll send you an invitation email, asking you to run a detailed Performance Test on your network connection and your computer configuration. The results of the Performance Test will then feed back up to OnLive, and if you are a fit for a test group at some point during Beta, we’ll let you install the OnLive plug-in into your browser. Then, we’ll ask you to spend some time playing…um, I mean…testing games OnLive.

As testers interact with the service and play games, OnLive will be constantly logging technical data, and then afterward, we’ll ask testers to give us feedback about their personal experiences with OnLive. This feedback will help us continue to evolve the features and experience of the OnLive Service, so it’s really important we get lots of feedback to bring the gaming community the best videogame platform and service possible.

OnLive

OnLive Blog

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