BT, a leading communications company in Britain, announced today that it's entered into a commercial partnership with the cloud computing games streaming service OnLive. BT has taken a 2.6 percent stake in OnLive and has exclusive rights to bundle the OnLive Game Service with broadband in the U.K.
This marks OnLive's first expansion into Europe. Back at GDC, the company gave a presentation of its service and announced that the PC and Mac versions of their on-demand game service will be launching during E3 2010 on June 17.
BT said it will announce further details about its launch plans later this year.
Gavin Patterson, CEO of BT Retail, commented, “Entertainment is going to be at the heart of what we offer customers in the future. The partnership with OnLive complements our existing BT Vision service. It’s great for our customers - they’ll have access to a huge catalogue of games, available instantly on their TV or PC without expensive hardware. And it’s great for BT - it will enhance our premium broadband position and we’ll be entering into a market that’s worth more than £2billion.”
Steve Perlman, CEO of OnLive, added, “The U.K. market is extremely important to OnLive and our videogame publishing partners as we expand into Europe. We view BT as the ideal U.K. partner. As gamers are moving increasingly to online game distribution, OnLive delivers video games as a pure form of online media, playable instantly on almost any video-capable device attached to the internet. The implications are nothing short of transformative to video games and in time, all interactive media. OnLive is delighted to be pioneering this revolutionary technology in the U.K. together with BT.”
On his OnLive blog, Perlman also noted "over the European Internet infrastructure, OnLive is AWESOME. We’ve tested OnLive across all of Western Europe spanning from the U.K. to Italy and from Scandinavia down to Spain... What’s great about Western Europe geographically is that so many countries are within a 1000 mile (1600 km) radius, which is within the latency limit for a single OnLive data center."
