> But in this case, I actually have no idea what Sony is actually buying? Could someone enlighten me as to why this is worth $380 million? It appears to be a su

> But in this case, I actually have no idea what Sony is actually buying? Could someone enlighten me as to why this is worth $380 million? It appears to be a super low latency video streamer/pusher with backend rendering and licensing agreements with various game publishers. You play games over Gaikai. Controller input and video decoding at the client end, top-end gaming hardware and video compression at the server end. The point is that people can play top-end games on a very low-spec PC (or STB) instead of a $900+ PC because the rendering is done off-site. There's lag, sure, but it's not as big a deal as you'd expect. The PCs at their end are virtualized, of course and not all games require the same resources at all times. As far as I know Gaikai's business model was based around publishers paying them to provide free demos of games for maximum exposure (I could be wrong). In contrast their competitors OnLive have a monthly subscription service of full games similar to Netflix.