Otoy hopes to encourage Amazon Web Services customers to decide to its royalty-free application streaming technology.
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Otoy, a 3D graphics technology company, this week said it had decided to maintain its ORBX and OctaneCloud Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) free, because of unexpected demand. If that demand could be sustained, Otoy could succeed where game streaming service OnLive failed.
AMIs are software packages which may boot an Amazon EC2 instance. Otoy’s AMIs allow 3D graphics to be rendered rapidly with assistance from a GPU. Along side ORBX.js, a JavaScript framework for streaming traditional applications from cloud-based servers, these AMIs enable Amazon Web Services customers to stream sophisticated 3D graphics applications which include Autodesk Maya, high-quality Hollywood movies, or graphically demanding 3D games to an internet browser without the desire for plug-ins, video codecs, or other client-side software.
Otoy began offering its ORBX and OctaneCloud AMIs at no cost in November, with the intention of raising the worth to $99 shortly thereafter. But Otoy founder and CEO Jules Urbach said in a phone interview that greater than 500 customers tried the service out within the first month, enough that Amazon took notice. In consultation with Amazon and Mozilla (either one of which reap the benefits of having Otoy’s technology as a free video delivery option) Otoy decided to maintain its AMIs free which will encourage developer adoption. The graphics company still intends to charge for usage of its Octane Render software.
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Urbach said companies and people are exploring Otoy’s streaming technology for a lot of uses. Some were watching the technology for delivering Autodesk applications from the cloud. Others were watching cloud gaming or streaming Windows or Linux applications, said Urbach. Two major movie studios are observing the technology so as to offer watermarked video-on-demand, without cumbersome DRM schemes.
Urbach says his company’s goal is to produce a royalty-free platform for streaming applications, games, and videos to Web browsers. He readily acknowledges that OnLive tried something similar but fell short.
“People will say OnLive tried this and it didn’t work,” he said, pointing to problems like high network latency. “Latency is often a subject matter and that i think the name of the sport would be getting the desired latency.”
Urbach says that many major content publishers has been kicking ORBX.js’s tires. It is not hard to determine why. ORBX.js can encode and decode video at in regards to the same quality as H.264 using only JavaScript, without H.264 licensing fees.
Brendan Eich, Mozilla’s CTO, the creator of JavaScript and a member of Otoy’s board, said he hopes Otoy’s technology can help end the practice of “burning video codecs into hardware.” H.264 is supported in Apple’s hardware partially because Apple is a member of the MPEG-LA patent consortium that oversees H.264.
The ORBX.js code, says Urbach, will eventually be released as open source. While there isn’t any official timeline for doing so, the goal is to have an open-source release on GitHub by the summer of 2014.
Thomas Claburn is editor-at-large for InformationWeek. He have been writing about business and technology since 1996 for publications along with New Architect, PC Computing, InformationWeek, Salon, Wired, and Ziff Davis Smart Business. He’s the writer of a science fiction novel, Reflecting Fires, and his mobile game Blocfall Free is out there for iOS, Android, and Kindle Fire.
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