Spawn Labs Blog

Hi Everyone -

Writing with most excellent news today. Spawn HD-720 has left the building! We shipped out to all our pre-order customers today and will be shipping daily on new orders going forward. You can check the press release here: http://bit.ly/706lgy.

Thanks to a combination of a number of great optimizations that have come together recently, I’m pleased to report that we have beaten our performance target for this first release. Playing across a LAN around the home or office is extremely tight, and playing across the Internet feels very good. In fact, performance (i.e. latency) has now been driven low enough that one of our kids (go Eli!) played Modern Warfare 2 on Xbox Live remotely from his laptop on the Spawn Player – essentially two levels of indirection – remote from the laptop to the X360, plus Xbox Live networked multiplayer.

While playing MW2 from his laptop, Eli simultaneously recorded the gameplay session in HD using the Spawn Player, and we posted an excerpt on YouTube here: http://bit.ly/7kpf6p. Note that the video quality of the game was actually significantly better in the live play and original recorded file – it’s been compressed by YouTube and has lost a chunk of quality/resolution in translation. 

The Spawn Labs approach to cloud gaming is significantly different than other companies in the market. From a technology perspective, our approach is peer-to-peer vs. the centralized, stream-it-all-from-our-datacenters concept. Essentially, you get your own cloud gaming server in your home, and you get to decide how to use it and what friends can access it with you. And from a user and business perspective, we see consoles as just as viable and important as ever, so we are as seamlessly as possible extending the console experience, helping our customers get more out of their investments in their  consoles and game libraries (past/present/future), and bringing mobility, enhanced social play, and content sharing to the console.

We are tremendously excited to reach this milestone, and we have a lot more good stuff up our sleeves, so stay tuned!

- David

Spawn Labs announces today that it is increasing the price of Spawn Gamepad Adapters from $29.95 to $39.95. We apologize for this price increase, but we found that the cost of goods of manufacturing the adapters is higher than we had anticipated, so the increase is necessary. We will honor the $29.95 price for all orders that have already been placed. All new orders received going forward will be charged at the new/adjusted price.

- David

Hi Folks -

I am writing to let you know that we are pushing out the ship date for the Spawn HD-720 by just one more week from January 18th to January 25th. Our offshore manufacturing in China took a little bit longer than expected, and we are expediting product via air to get it back here in time to ship a week from Monday. Sorry for this second delay to our ship date, even if it’s a minor one. But get ready – it’s coming!

- David

Spawn Labs is announcing some good news today. The Spawn HD-720 has passed CE certification testing, so we can now take orders from customers in any country in the European Union. Shipping to Europe is currently going to be a bit expensive at US$100, but we’ll reduce this as soon as we can get around to setting up a warehousing and fulfillment capability inside Europe – most likely in the UK. Thanks to everyone who has been contacting us and inquiring about availability of the product in various EU countries, and hope this news finds you all well!

- David

Following up on my last blog post, we have evaluated our product release status, and we are re-setting our target release date for the the Spawn HD-720 to January 18th. We are now essentially done writing code for the product features, and we’re planning to take the next several weeks to finish testing and hardening the quality of the product prior to general release. We’ll be sending evaluation units out in December to our major game developer customers and to the gaming media. And then we’ll release to the larger consumer audience January 18th. Thanks to everyone who is following our progress, and we’re very excited now to finally be so close to the finish (or rather the starting) line.

Looks like it’s about time to crank up the ol’ blog, and start communicating with everyone out there more regularly. Unfortunately, the topic of my first post is that we are running a little bit behind in finishing up the first release of the product, so we aren’t going to make our initial target to ship in November. I know a bunch of you out there are as disappointed with this news as we are internally. To atone for our tardiness, we have purchased a taser. Each day we all draw straws, and one unfortunate employee gets “tased”. But seriously, we are disappointed to miss our target ship date, and we are heads down working as hard as we can to bring it home. More updates on this front soon. Keep the faith! We are close.