How PlayStation owners are creating private clouds for gaming

When Sony launched the PlayStation 4, it touted that the new games console was built around five design principles: Simple, Immediate, Social, Integrated, and Personalized. They could well have added one more - Connected.

Gamers today are utilizing the Sony PlayStation ecosystem to build their own private cloud for gaming with the PlayStation 4 as the central server, broadcasting its gaming content to a vast array of connected devices - TVs, handheld consoles, and even phones. I'm one such gamer, with PS4 gaming available to me in my basement games room, on my big screen family room TV, and in my bedroom, all powered by a single console broadcasting across my home network. Here's how.

The $380 million fix

In 2012 Sony spent $380 million to acquire cloud-based gaming service Gaikai. The move was primarily to acquire Gaikai's game streaming technology, a capability that Sony had attempted, rather unsuccessfully, to develop itself. Five years earlier Sony announced a feature called Remote Play that transmitted games from a PlayStation 3 to a PlayStation Portable (PSP) handheld console. The support was limited to PlayStation 1 games and a handful of native PS3 games, but this was the first opportunity for gamers to play their games without being tethered to their home consoles. At least in theory. In practice performance was poor, controls were laggy, and interruptions in streaming were commonplace.

Those early issues were mainly caused by the PS3 itself. The Remote Play technology was a software solution, whereby the PS3 games console - already busy processing a game - had to also create a separate video encoding for the handheld console, stream this across a network, and process the responses from the handheld as the player rapidly clicked buttons and moved analog sticks.

That's where Gaikai's technology could help. Sony integrated its capabilities into the hardware of the PlayStation 4, where all of the video encoding and network connectivity are handled by dedicated processors rather than in software. The result is a private cloud of gaming wonder.

Private gaming cloud

In my basement sits my PlayStation 4 connected to a TV. Just as with the PS3, I can sit in my gaming chair and play FIFA soccer til the cows come home. But I'm no longer tied to playing games where my console resides.

That same PS4 is connected to my home network via an ethernet cable. When I head upstairs to the family room, those same PS4 games are still available to me. My TV in that room is connected to a PlayStation TV - a tiny device that is also connected to my home network. It connects to my PS4 through the Gaikai powered Remote Play feature and lets me stream my PS4 games. My old PS3 controllers, paired with the PlayStation TV, control the action. There's very little lag (just a little) and the picture quality looks great. It's often hard to tell that I'm streaming at all.

But what about those Sunday morning lie-ins? No need to stop the gaming. My PlayStation Vita (the latest Sony handheld console that superseded the PSP) also supports Remote Play. So, via WiFi, I can connect to my PS4 and stream games there too. It even words on the road, with a little bit of port forwarding on my home router, meaning in theory I can play my PS4 games from my own PS4 console wherever there's a decent WiFi signal.

The future

This Remote Play feature - allowing a gamer to take their games and play them on multiple devices - has further to go still. The Sony Xperia smartphones and tablets support it too, allowing you to extend your private gaming cloud to your mobile device. And now PCs and Macs have dedicated Remote Play applications too.

While Remote Play is a moderate opportunity to generate revenue for Sony through potential hardware sales, its technology is also key to another offering - PlayStation Now - which offers true cloud gaming whereby gamers rent time to play games running on Sony's servers.

That's the public cloud offering. But for now, legions of gamers who have already built up a sizable collection of their own games now have the option to play those games in ways that would never be possible before. A private cloud for gaming. Now I can shoot bad guys, race cars, and score goals in every room of my house. My wife, as you can imagine, is simply "delighted"