IBC
Far more than a game streaming service, Google Stadia represents a
transformative shift in digital communication.
Google’s
announcement of a cloud gaming service does far more than shake-up the video
games industry. It’s part of a global shift in computing technology, in which
in Google’s own terms, the data centre becomes the platform.
“This is a huge
evolution for digital services, cloud computing and for digital communication,”
said Ed Barton, chief analyst for entertainment at Ovum.
“The idea of the
data centre becoming the platform shifts the compute demands away from personal
devices to the network and the cloud meaning that developers are no longer
bound by the limits of silicon at the end user. Instead, the amount of resource
you can draw on is of Google scale. That, potentially, is extraordinarily
powerful.”
Edge computing
relocates computer processing from hardware devices in the home or mobile
devices into data centres hosting massive compute firepower with data relayed
over fibre networks or to one of the billions of new 5G cellular sites being
installed worldwide (or combination of both) back to the user’s screen in next
to no time.
Edge computing
could reduce the workload and battery drain on mobile devices while providing a
superior end user experience.
For applications
like games but also future media experiences in virtual reality and augmented
reality that require astronomical levels of computing power, edge computing
moves the heavy lifting to the cloud. The geographic proximity and low-latency
network access to a 5G connection mean a souped-up mobile experience.
Intel, Verizon,
Fox, Facebook, AT&T all have innovation labs intent on exploiting the edge.
Paolo Pescatore,
media and telco analyst, PP Foresight explained that “more devices connected to
the network allows users to access more bandwidth hungry applications and will
lead to a proliferation of data traffic”.
He added: “The need
for more computing power closer to the edge is paramount. Networks will become
more efficient leading to the emergence of new business models.”
Google’s
hard-hitting announcement places Stadia as a direct competitor to rivals
Microsoft, Sony and Steam. When it launches later this year, in North America,
the UK and most of Europe, subscribers can stream blockbuster games to any
smartphone, tablet, laptop or TV running Alphabet’s Chrome web browser.
It would be
possible for a user to start playing on their TV and resume playing on their
phone when they leave the house. There’s no need for any console or set-top-box
style hardware to buy or upgrade, just a familiar joystick controller which
links to the device by WiFi.
On launch, it will
support the streaming of games in high dynamic range at 60 frames per second
and in 4K resolution with 8K and frame rates of 120 anticipated.
It is being primed
for multi-player video gaming, a trend which has recently gained mass
popularity with Fortnite in which players using Xbox One and PlayStation 4
consoles can compete together.
Google will look to
capitalise on the 4 billion smartphones in the market worldwide, a significant
increase on the number of active home gaming consoles, expected to reach 170m
in 2019, according to Futuresource.
One of Stadia’s
features is the ability for players to record sequences of gameplay which they
can then share as a link over YouTube for other players anywhere to join.
Crucially, all this
will have minimal lag in processing the interactions of gamers round-tripping
to the cloud and back over the internet.
That’s because
Stadia uses Google’s data centres housed in more than 200 countries and
territories, to power the service and rely on the 7,500 edge node locations of
Google’s Edge Network.
Its data centres
will make use of GPUs built by AMD that are claimed more powerful than those in
Sony PlayStation 4 and Microsoft’s Xbox One X consoles. AMD’s custom chips can
ship 10.7 teraflops of power compared to the 6 teraflops delivered by an Xbox
One. Each Stadia computing instance is powered by a 2.7GHz x86 processor with
16GB of RAM, according to the company.
Combined with
custom CPUs which, Google says, are “elastic” in that the cloud-hosted hardware
can be multiplied to create more visually ambitious (data-intensive) games.
While Stadia will
work over 4G mobile networks, the service is primed for the launch of 5G for
which between 1 Gbps and 5 Gbps speeds are promised even in 5G’s early phases.
“The ability for
Stadia to compete against console or PC gaming processing power is reliant on
the user having access to a strong internet connection, otherwise gamers may choose
to stick with their existing console or PC set up,” says Futuresource analyst,
Morris Garrard.
“With the imminent
adoption of 5G and Wi-Fi 6, some latency issues will be solved, however the
roll out of these next generation connectivity technologies will be slow. China
has committed to the rollout of highspeed 5G networks, and as the largest
mobile gaming network worldwide, there is certainly a lot of opportunity for
the uptake of Stadia.”
The latest flagship
smartphones set for release this year from Sony, Samsung, LG and Huawei are
5G-enabled. These devices also come with multiple cameras and larger (flexible)
screens. Sony’s Xperia 1 has a 4K cinemascope-style display. All of which
points to video as the driver for consumer use.
Cisco predicts that
by 2021, more traffic will created in one year than in every year since the
inception of the internet combined. The vast bulk of that data will be video.
“The video space is
ripe for innovation with the transition to 5G,” says Barton. “Rather than
supplementing viewing experiences native to other screens, mobile is set to
come into its own as a primary video entertainment distribution channel.”
Over 5G, an entire
box set could be downloaded in UHD quality within seconds. Cristiano Amon,
president at chipmaker Qualcomm says that 95% of the time 4K video will be
streamed at full bitrate over 5G.
The Tokyo 2020
Olympics will be a showcase for 5G applications including Virtual Reality in 8K
resolution (probably 4K per eye) in a demonstration organised by Japan’s NTT
Docomo. RYOT Lab, Verizon’s innovation hub, is experimenting with holographic
presence over 5G.
Stadia is also well
placed to push 8K gaming content, Futuresource feels, despite the current
installed base of capable screens being a major sticking point for its usage.
The name Stadia,
according to Google, is meant to reflect that it will be a collection of
entertainment, of which the viewer can choose to sit back and watch, or take an
active part in.
Many observers
believe gaming will be the killer app to entice consumers to subscribe to 5G
services. Niantic, makers of mobile AR game phenomenon Pokemon Go, is shortly
releasing a new multi-player realtime AR game Harry Potter: Wizards Unite to
maximise the low latency and edge computing aspects of 5G.
“We’re at the
beginning of a whole new era of digital interactive experiences for information
and entertainment,” founder & chief executive John Hanke said at MWC2019.
“A paradigm change like this happens once every couple of decades.”
Hanke began Niantic
as a start-up within Google that helped build the apps that became Google Maps
and Google Earth. The developer has now built a games-engine that maps the
physical world around users of its games via their mobile phone cameras. It is
doing this with a machine learning algorithm able to calculate the pixel depth
of people and objects in real-time.
“That means we can
photograph and analyse a user’s immediate environment and their positional data
to create an AR map in the cloud and serve it back to share with other users,”
explained Hanke.
It means that
virtual characters or objects and all interactions with them will be visible to
all game-players at the same time.
“Edge computing
allows us to perform compute intensive work such as arbitrating the real-time
interactions of a thousand individuals playing in a small geographic area.”
The other Achilles’
heel of AR is the latency of data being sent over the network in response to
user actions. “Even good latency times today are 100 milliseconds. With 5G we
can get that to a near instantaneous 10ms,” Hanke said.
New applications
like this will still put a huge strain on congested networks. Analyst Pescatore
says that telcos need to deploy ultra-fast broadband connectivity far more
quickly.
“5G combined with
the cloud powered by artificial intelligence and computing distributed from the
cloud to the edge will enable the vision of services like Google Stadia and
other mixed reality content to come to life.”
Digital players
like YouTube, Tencent and Facebook benefitted hugely from the transition to 4G
as they and not the telcos capitalised on the rich video services that faster
broadband enabled. The dilemma for telcos this time around is to avoid becoming
a dumb pipe.
“5G and edge
computing will further empower the already awesomely powerful digital
networks,” warns Barton. “There is no simple answer for telcos who must invest
heavily but somehow generate revenues from next-gen services like Stadia.”
Futuresource
expects mixed or extended reality to be on Google Stadia’s roadmap. “AR and VR
are certainly technologies Google continues to back [and] thanks to the
popularity of the Android operating system, it has one of the largest AR
ecosystems, through ARCore,” says Garrard.
“As a content
platform Stadia, may negate some of the entry costs for consumers to access VR
content. This, however, will require further investment and high bandwidth
internet connections.”
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