While LG was demonstrating the cloud-gaming capabilities of its televisions with OnLive, Samsung announced a partnership with Gaikai, a competing cloud-gaming service that was recently featured in the NVIDIA keynote at the GTC conference when GeForce Grid was announced. The end-game is to provide Samsung TV customers with an integrated cloud-gaming client that is as capable of playing those games than today’s tablets. This means that any Samsung TV that can connect to Gaikai will offer a gaming experience similar to a high-end PC.
While most of the articles online mentioned that Samsung TVs from the 7000 Series and up would be supported, we need to stress that only 2012 models and newer will be compatible with the Gaikai cloud-gaming feature. At the moment, Samsung only supports Gaikai, but LG does support both services. Given that the client-side is very thin, it is fair to bet that unless LG has an exclusive deal of some sort, Samsung will probably add support for OnLive down the road. The good news for all users: that’s one less “box” that you’ll need in your living room as TVs integrate more and more computing functions.
Are you ready to jump on cloud-gaming? Did you try it? Let us know what you think of the idea of having this capability in televisions.