OnLive to subscribers: keep an eye on your data usage

If you’re a huge gamer, then you’re probably already up to date when it comes to video gaming news and the latest on gaming services. Video games aren’t meant to be just enjoyed by your lonesome on some handheld device or game console either; in fact, many games and services are now online or network based so you can interact and play with other users in the course of the game. One such service is OnLive, which has been a proven hit in the United States.

OnLive is an online game streaming service that allows users to play their selection of games on devices such as the PC, Mac, iPad, Android and HDTV.

Around last month, OnLive was launched in the UK in partnership with BT Broadband. This proved to be good news to BT customers as they were given three months of access to the service, free of charge.

However, users must remember that aside from paying for the service, they’re also paying for the amount of data they’re requesting and sending while accessing OnLive. In fact, it has been found that users can go through 20GBs of data in a matter of 6 hours. To some, that might seem like too long a duration to be playing video games. But to the hardcore gamer, six hours is nothing.

Because of the huge amounts of data the on-demand gaming platform requires, OnLive has advised its users to keep a close eye and monitor the amount of data they’re using while gaming. In fact, it was reported that running Playing for Cause 2 for five minutes on the platform utilized over 200MB of data. Project this to six hours and you will end up having used 20GB of data–not a very smart thing to do, if your broadband subscription isn’t an unlimited one.

Customers of broadband provider TalkTalk had earlier found that the ISP had blocked the platform during peak hours. This was eventually addressed by a spokesperson from the company, who explained that the connection restriction was because TalkTalk had mistakenly identified OnLive as a peer-to-peer sharing program.