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

This entry was posted on Monday, January 25th, 2010 at 5:18 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.