My brain must be running slow today, I JUST realised that it was the link to the video that I was trying to post, I must have copied the wrong damned URL. Still haven't had a chance to watch it myself

But they're not going to provide it to anyone at anything less than optimal quality. After all they're guaranteed enough teething problems as it is.

If you have a crappy experience with Youtube. You have a crummy ISP, you're watching poor quality videos, or you're computer doesn't play nice with flash.
Watch the demo at Columbia University...
Also Onlive isn't the only company doing this. David Perry (developer of Earthworm Jim, MDK, etc.) is working on a very similar service (Gaikai).

Heh, my computer runs Flash to the max. And I'm with the largest carrier (and former monopolist) of Italy (Telecom Italia) so if the experience is crappy I should share it with a huge bunch of Italian netizens....
Whatever the ISP is, furthermore, this is a case of "real life experience", a not so uncommon one in my country, from which I can definitely infer a "thumbs down" product for this vaporware named "OnLive"...

Well I've heard some ISPs throttle YouTube...or maybe YouTube speeds are just shit anyway.

After watching the video I'm not going to be so quick to dismiss this. I don't think its going to take off all over the world at once however. America will definatly have it but then only countrys with good internet structure will get it after that. Then only if onlive can cut deals with the major internet providers for each country, as being able to root the stream in a direct route as possible seems to be a big part of getting it to work.
Anyone dismissing it also that hasn't actually watched the video probably should as it makes it sound like it could actually work.

Heh...did OnLive kill your dog?

No, but advertising shitware always kills my sense of humour because I don't like to be treated like a dumb asshole.

Good to know you have already tested this and given it a fair shot.
I'm going with: poo'd in corn flakes.

Looking at how much my North American (We have good broadband) ISP lags when palying TF2, I can safely say that OnLive is at BEST a gimmick which will let people play low-end games on netbooks.

I don't understand. Why would it matter if the game being broadcast is low end or high end? Theoretically wouldn't a game like say...Geometry Wars require similar bandwidth as Crysis?

It does but it can get the compression and the game playing (the game IS played on servers somewhere in the US, after all) faster than Crysis because it's a low-end game.

Many lower-end games of which I speak are not twitch-based, so lag will not affect their performance much, unlike an action-heavy game like, say, TF2 or WOW.