PC GAME STREAMING ON XBOX ONE, AND VICE VERSA
Part of yesterday's Microsoft keynote was focused on game streaming, but not the type that PlayStation Now is attempting to achieve. Rather, with Windows 10, you'll be able to push Xbox One games to any Windows 10 device (well, not phones -- that's a tremendously bad idea) on your local network (WiFi or hardwired). Pretty simple: By using the Xbox app on Windows 10, you can right-click whatever game you own on Xbox One and select to stream it, which will then start the game and stream it to the PC. But what if someone is already using that Xbox One to watch TV or HBO Go or anything else that isn't a game? Things get complicated pretty quickly. Here's Spencer on those complications:
"Our intent is somebody could be watching television on the Xbox One -- running any Windows application. Our goal is that you'd be able to do both. We haven't perfectly landed that yet, so I didn't answer that question completely onstage. But I want to be transparent that our goal is to have it so that if my kids are watching TV and I want to go up and play Forza and there's like this TV contention, I could go do that. It loads in the background. So that's our intent, but we haven't completely landed that scenario."
Spencer doesn't have much better answers about the potential for streaming PC games to the Xbox One -- something that Razer's $99 Android TV box is capable of, mind you -- but he pre-empted our own question with an impromptu answer on just that. "It's something that we're really looking at. This announcement was what we had, but if you think about that vision -- my games are my games, wherever I am -- we want to be able to land solutions that are as native as the one we showed there," Spencer said.
As for how seamless the streaming experience will be in terms of ending the stream and picking up where you left off on the Xbox One itself, Spencer expects the ability to directly transition from one platform to the other to be there from the start.