Is OnLive the New Fourth Game Console? Actually, Maybe

I was surprised to read about this, this morning. And when I was ready to write it off, I read that a “raft of major publishers” including EA, Ubisoft, Take-Two, Atari, etc. are on board. This could be big:

A games startup called OnLive will be coming out of stealth mode today at the Game Developers Conference. Here’s the proposition: they take the heavy processing part of video games and move it into — and I apologize for using this hated, hated word — the Cloud. All the high-end graphics heavy lifting happens at some server farm, instead of on the overheated, overpriced chips in your PC or your console, and what you see onscreen is just the end-product, shipped to whatever machine you happen to be playing on in realtime using some ultra-powerful compression algorithm.

via Is OnLive the New Fourth Game Console? Actually, Maybe :: Nerd World – TIME.com.