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In todays ‘Drax Files Radio Hour’ we air an interview with Dennis Harper, Sr. Product Manager of SL Go. The SL streaming service that recently announced it would not continue after Sony bought important patents from OnLive, making it impossible to continue the service.
In the interview Dennis talks about how SL Go came to be, the future he imagined for it a, how the SL Go community grew and how SL Go got a huge boost at the very last moment thanks to the inworld paying option.
I’d love to see Linden Lab put that in Second Life, allowing us to pay our tier and premium fee inworld!
About the sale Dennis says that Sony never intended to own or run the service, they were only interested in the intellectual property and patterns. Buying these meant Onlive simply had to stop in their tracks.
Onlive was put on the market because it was not profitable, but they were getting close to turning this around. Cloud steaming itself is a very good business but it just took a lot of investment, time and effort to get the customers they needed.
The long time yield over a customer was just not enough and as Dennis describes it; Onlive just ran out of runway and money.
Onlive was ahead of its time, like Second Life once was.
Dennis feels that they could have made it an incredibly viable business if they had had another year or two. Cloud gaming is the future. Onlive had been looking for a buyer for some time, several parties were interested and some of them did want to take over and run the service, but in the end they decided to sell to Sony.
Linden Lab did show some interest in SL Go and did come to discuss the service, but I personally don’t think they actually made an offer.
Dennis said that Linden Lab and OnLive had some discussions on closer business partnerships, but nothing solid ever came from it. Ultimately, OnLive might not have been the best solution for Linden Lab, as Second Life represents hundreds of thousands of potential users. OnLive has a great service, but that number of users may have swamped them. However, OnLive was actively working on new technology that would allow for this volume of users. If given time, he is confident that OnLive would have solved that problem.
But the end of SL Go does not have to mean the end of streaming Second Life.
I’ve written before about how I felt LL should offer SL Go as a free or cheap service for premium members and it seems they actually did look into this.
One option could be the service Amazon hosts called ‘Amazon Appstream’, something I never heard of before till I read about it on Inara Pey’s blog.
Amazon has lots and lots of servers all over the world that are far from being really pushed to their limit. Most of the time they even stand idle. Linden Lab could perhaps rent those servers. It is at least something Linden Lab should look at and perhaps experiment with.
Dennis thinks that Linden Lab has now realised the possibilities of streaming SL and what it means to many users and potentially many more people who use their virtual world. Thanks to SL Go, SL finally worked on mobile devices and finally looked good.
Dennis also mentions that now that SL will soon no longer be supported for people using XP or Vista OS on their computer.
These users, according to a reputable source at least 40-50.000 people, will soon be stuck on older viewers, unable to update to any new feature SL introduces and eventually making it impossible for them to use it.To them SL Go was a (second) life safer.
They will be left in the cold and so will those of us who can’t afford the big computers you need to run SL the way it should be running; with awesome graphics and no lag.
Forget about Sony. If you want to enjoy SL the way you did with SL Go you need to ask Linden Lab, they are the only ones who could get this done.
Personally I think that SL Go has proven that streaming Second Life works, that there is a market for it, that it means a lot to many SL users and that it could have a drastic effect on the reputation of our virtual world by flooding the internet with amazing high quality graphics and eventually perhaps even machinima.
Linden Lab is going to look running the Next Generation Second Life on mobile devices anyway, so it would be a good idea for them to start experimenting with streaming Second Life now and use that experience to make NGSL even better.
So the ball is in Linden Lab’s corner. They are the ones that could bring back SL streaming and I think they should. Linden Lab has the talent and the technology and the former SL Go staff have the know-how and experience. I also think that if they work together on building something from scratch that will just concentrate on streaming SL, there would be no issues regarding the patents Onlive sold to Sony.
SL Stream will improve SL for a lot of users and may even find a way to get more of them to sign up as premium members or even “Plus Premium” members who’ll pay a little more for the streaming service.
So forget about Sony and politely, patiently and friendly tell Linden Lab why you think streaming SL is a good idea.
Make sure you catch the interview in todays Drax Files broadcast, you can listen to it by clicking here.
To end this article, I’m sharing a few quotes, stories and opinions from SL Go users about what the loss of this service means to them and why it is important to try and find or create an alternative.
Melissa Ussy
OMG i had no idea water was SUPPOSED TO look that way!!!!
Adrian Mondrian
“I’d been hoping to get my mom into Second Life soon. She’s coming to visit me next month, and a tablet would have been a much more feasible purchase right now than a high-end laptop, for both financial as well as technical reasons. With SL Go gone, our options are more limited. I still want to introduce her to the world somehow — I actually think she’d love SL once she got used to it, especially since she feels quite isolated where she’s currently living — but it becomes a more complicated undertaking and not nearly as “accessible” an experience for her as it could otherwise have been.”
Elrik Merlin
I think the loss of this service is a great shame. Although I don’t know how popular the service was, I am sure there are quite a few users who will now no longer be able to access SL, and a great potential for expanding the reach of virtual worlds to people with almost any kind of end-user device, is being lost – at a time when the whole business of virtual reality is getting additional attention and environments like SL are being shown to be a decade ahead of the curve, and when increasingly tablets and mobile devices are increasingly the internet access equipment of choice.
Selena
I am an estate owner and pay the premium membership. Normally I use my own computer to run SL but recently my mother had a life altering surgery that has required me to move in with her and use her new but not meant for graphics computer. SL GO has allowed me to continue to service my estate and keep in touch with my residents. The closing down of SL GO will be a hard blow indeed.
Aelggyva Fenwitch (Effy)
Once i saw what Second life and its many artists and creators meant me to see in previously unattainable graphic settings my virtual life underwent a major change . I was able to visit some astounding visual creations and interact with other visitors in a much more rewarding way.
I am really not looking forward to returning to my virtual life which consists of walking through treacle surrounded by grey blocks.
DevinVaughn
With SL Go, I could be film maker. The frame rates were smooth while normally my computer skips. …And I could do it with advanced lighting too. I could also do amazing things like waltz into the super busy The Arcade sim, and yard sale hunt at Epic without choking on all those avatars, textures, and meshes densely populating a small area. … I even figured out how to use SL Go for my blog photos. SL Go photography saved the day but when I would otherwise crash trying to get the shot. (Yes, I was brutal with SL Go photography, pushing it past it’s limits with ultra advanced lighting, 16x anti aliasing, and trying to do a larger image size than double my screen resolution and it would crash on me of course. lol) But when I needed fast and reliable, SL Go photography was there for me. … I had big plans to use SL Go for my coverage of Fantasy Faire. I was planning to make movies while the sims were crawling with people, filming them all in thier wonderful and wacky outfits, and I would do all it on Ultra settings too. …. It sent me reeling that something so useful, SL Go, was taken away suddenly without warning and no way to fill void left behind. …. SL Go was a great tool and I enjoyed having it. I hope in the future there will be new ways to solve the problems of making VR faster, stable, able to handle busy sims, be beautifully lit, and of course, do it while waiting in line at doctor office or sitting on the beach.
A.
I used singularity – graphics setting as low as they’d go, a draw of 32 – max avis 3 at the most – often 2, so i could see my partner and i dance.
In crowded places, i looked like a whirling dervish – i couldn’t control my movement and anyone moving in front of me took my fps from 7 – SEVEN mind you, at the best – to 2 and i’d crash. You can’t run a venue like that.
Then sl go and FS – and i became so dependent SO very quickly.
I’m so crushed – and i know from using it again now, that singularity is if possible going to continue to be worse.
I’m looking at closing both venues, and leaving second life – i can’t afford a new box.
Maybe going to InWorldz to see if it’s better there, that’s what losing sl go means to me. The fact that i’ve never seen a framerate over 10 in my three years in sl says it all, i think.
Ali V
It means i have to buy or build a new computer in order to continue being on sl.
LL is out “tech’ing” themselves from mainstream people.
Sarah Snow
It means the end of SL as it should be experienced. for me at least
Jaska BloodMoon
It means my fiancée will be unable to join me in SL until sometime down the road when I’m capable of breaking free from the chains instilled by bills and bloated prices, and finally buy a better laptop that she can use.
Ed Merryman
well it does mean that I won’t be able to use my xp pc for sl much longer,, but LL won’t be worried about that 😛
Jaska BloodMoon
It’s bad enough that I have more money going out to bills than I have coming in right now, paying a bloated price just to stream a viewer so that my laptop can run it just isn’t in the cards for me, at least not at the moment. That’s why I liked OnLive as an option, paying by Linden took quite a bit of weight off my shoulders.
The hardest thing for people right now is that Second Life is changing and becoming more and more demanding of computers. A low to mid-range computer that used to be able to run SL is now barely able to function properly, and these low to mid-range computers are “new” computers that are literally obsolete right out of the box. Most people can’t afford to pay a one lump sum for a high-end rig, especially when the rigs that are capable of running SL the way it’s meant to be run is well over 1 to 2,000 USD. x.x Some folks could probably afford that and save up for it rather quickly, but with so many places price gouging on their Internet services or electric, or what have you, bills just aren’t permitting for some folks. Some of SLs residents draw a monthly disability in RL, and SL is pretty much their reality, and it’s a reality that they can’t truly enjoy. -shrug- Just my thoughts.
Katy
for me the effect personally is negligible except when i’m away from home and have to use my laptop. But what bothers me is the large number of people who have had their first experience of being able to see and function in SL as it is meant to be, and will no longer have that ability.
Jo Yardley's Second Life 
“…SL will soon no longer be supported for people using XP or Vista OS on their computer…”
Sorry, but this is a different issue, and while one answer (in this case at least) is the same – cloud gaming – the fact is that operating systems come to the end of their lives. They can’t be supported or extended forever: it’s just a fact of computer life that we have all had to live with since the beginning of the technology.
Computers get old, operating systems get old, both become unsupportable or at the very least cannot support the latest features… that’s all there is to it, I’m afraid.
And bear in mind that the cost of making things backwards-compatible indefinitely is that you become increasingly limited in how you can develop your technology. You suddenly can’t implement improvements because they don’t work on the old OS. So you don’t implement them for the vast majority of users who have long since moved on. So you fall behind the curve. Doom.
Few would suggest that the latest games should remain acceptably playable on an operating system introduced a decade and a half ago – XP was introduced in 2001 – and nobody should expect it to be true of SL either. Sad but true and unavoidable. Sorry.
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True of course, but that doesn’t change the fact that for possibly thens of thousands of SL users SLGo would have allowed them to keep playing SL.
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Absolutely. But while carefully avoiding the question of how long an OnLive client could support an obsolete OS (presumably a good deal longer than a full-blown Viewer, but you never know – that would be a Dennis question), the fact is that SL Go was the answer to a great many access issues of which OS end-of-life is just one.
I must say, I want to know how realistic this Amazon Apps idea is – it sounds potentially significant. The important aspect would be the latency and definition of the video path. Most apps only need to update relatively slowly – as anyone using a system like LogMeIn will know. An SL Go type service needs 720p (preferably 1080p) video and updating as fast as possible (something that also applies to the control path).
I imagine that LL and Firestorm have the rights to their special SL Go Viewers, so that work wouldn’t have to be re-invented?
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@Elrik
I suspect you might be missing the point.
This has nothing to do with “supporting” an outdated OS, or of limiting the Lab’s ability to enhance the platform or getting caught-up in issues of back-compatibility.
There is no reason why a streamed service, such as provisioned through something like Amazon AppStream and delivered to users through a web browser cannot be entirely operating system agnostic.
As such, it could provide the means by which those who may otherwise find themselves no longer able to install the viewer on their XP systems with the means to continue to engage with SL, just as SL Go provides the means by which those on outdated hardware the means to enjoy SL – and without any impact at all to LL or SL.
Granted, this shouldn’t be a major consideration for the Lab in considering options – hence why I listed it as only one of four possible reasons (and their are others). However, given the changes that are coming down the track, and the fact that for many, obtaining a newer version of their OS does equate to getting new hardware, it is worth pointing-out and considering.
WRT latency, that’s an issue; however, SL Go demonstrated that (by-and-large) 720p can work – and also that the technology is progressing at a rate fast enough to address such issues.
As it is, Amazon AppStream would seem ideal, as it offers a potentially cost-effective, fast-track means by which the Lab could prototype and trial an option, just as they did with Gaikai in 2010.
“I imagine that LL and Firestorm have the rights to their special SL Go Viewers”
AFAIK, there was no “special SL Go” viewer supplied by either LL or Firestorm. OnLive simply took the viewers “as is” and then disabled those aspects within them (e.g. the Advanced and Develop(er) menus) which were deemed as presenting potential paths which might otherwise be exploited to gain access to OnLive’s servers.
However, the Lab might still – as i’ve pointed to above, and in my own recent coverage of the recent SL Go turn of events – have access to the browser-based work they did with Gaikai back in 2010, and which might be available for leveraging.
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@Inara…
I think we’re mangling a couple of points here, which is largely my fault I’m afraid.
1. The point about obsolete operating systems was that in the absence of an SL Go style solution, it was not practical for a Viewer design to support obsolete operating systems indefinitely: either some new features would be unavailable or the developer would have to avoid adding some new features, neither of which would be practical. In the absence of an SL Go style solution.
2. I think the idea of delivering a streamed service via a web browser is a great idea and definitely (the) one to pursue, but I didn’t address this, as SL Go was not a system of this type – it had its own app and/or hardware and did not deliver the stream in a web browser. However, one can imagine that in essence the requirement on the downlink side is simply for a live streaming video player running in a web browser – for which there are a large number of precedents. I agree that 720p is acceptable for most people, though machinimatographers might want more (I could really have used 1080p, for example).
3. I don’t recall any details about the Gakai experiment – another company annexed by Sony – but certainly browser-based cloud streaming seems the way to go, although this was not the way SL Go was done.
4. “AFAIK, there was no “special SL Go” viewer supplied by either LL or Firestorm.” Apologies – for some reason I was under the impression that this was the case.
Notwithstanding anything above, I agree with you 100% and I do hope it comes to pass. I think being able to access SL with low-spec machines, and more generically via a web browser, is exactly what’s required, and my apologies if anything I said inferred that this was not the case.
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And With the Open Sim community leading, in fact there could be a alternative sooner then one expects to SL Go service, just not only limited to SL or with LL support.
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