OnLive Getting Livelier

OnLive has been forging ahead lately with some interesting deals. First off, they've added a flat-rate plan, which gets you all the games you can eat for $10 a month. This should help attract more users, especially those who like to sample a wide range of games. The sticking point right now is the game selection isn't huge; only a few dozen right now. Until that expands, the appeal of a flat-rate plan may be limited.

Which brings us to the next big deal. Or rather several big deals. OnLive secured a major patent on their technology in December, which will make it harder for competition to occur. They've hired away Pandora's COO Etienne Handman to serve as their COO, which will give OnLive some solid experience with streaming media and media companies other than games (if you're not familiar with Pandora, you should be). And last but certainly not least, OnLive has signed a big deal with Vizio, where Vizio will be building OnLive into a wide range of HDTV's, Blu-ray players, and tablets. This is a great feature for Vizio ("It's like having a console built in to your TV!) and will bring a slew of new potential subscribers to OnLive.

Hopefully OnLive can use these deals to leverage some more games out of publishers; they really need their service to be more populated. While I'm still rather skeptical of the service, given the technical limitations and the requirement for pretty high bandwidth, it's a good way to get first-run titles in front of a larger audience, which can benefit sales for the industry. As higher bandwidth becomes more available (someday!) the service will be more useful. The real test is in the next six months. If they can't succeed in signing up a lot more content in the near term, I don't think the service has much of a future.