Verizon, Intel team on TV gaming

In its latest initiative in the gaming arena, Verizon has now teamed with Intel to make Verizon Games On Demand available via Intel’s Viiv technology platform, which makes PC-based content viewable on a TV set.

“Viiv is trying to take digital content and enable people to move from consumption on a PC to consumption in the den, where most people want it,” said Mitch Dornich, group manager for new product development at Verizon Communications. “In that spirit, we are taking that Games on Demand service, which was a two-foot experience using a PC and a mouse, and modifying the games from a graphics standpoint to enable them to work in a 10-foot experience using a key pad or, more likely, a game controller. For us, it is expanding the area where you would use that Games on Demand content.”

In addition, the two companies will market a version of Verizon’s PlayLinc, its multiplayer online gaming experience for serious gamers.

Viiv runs on PCs equipped with Microsoft XP Media Center Edition (MCE) operating system. The idea, Dornich said, is to use the a TV set as a giant monitor for the PC, which plugs directly into a USB port on the TV set or into a device that provides a USB connection and an RGB connection into an older TV.

Initially, Verizon will make a subset of its Games on Demand content available for Viiv, he said. In its current iteration, Games on Demand, which targets casual gamers and families with different packages of games, costs $9.95 a month.

“Games on Demand sits inside the Viiv experience, and you can purchase it if you are not a Verizon customer, but if you are a Verizon customer, you can get FiOS experience,” Dornich said.

“This is a test,” he said. “We are going out with one package, a pretty generic package, and there are different types of packages within that. Depending on how successful it is--since there is some effort in terms of converting games over--we will take additional titles and add them to the package.”

Verizon’s multiple initiatives in the gaming arena are intended to help the company learn more about this kind of content and what its customers want, Dornich said. Verizon offers two products for casual games--Games on Demand and Verizon Arcade, in addition to PlayLinc, which targets serious gamers.

“We are doing a lot of different things to explore what this market is and what gives us relevancy,” he said. “Gaming tends to segment into different groups. You have to have a lot of different balls in the air. The we track those and see how they are going--take the ones that are working and build on it.”

The new service will include the ability to play games with no installations--it is a streaming service--and to schedule game play. It also includes a wireless gamepad that is similar to a game console.

PlayLinc, which Verizon launched this summer to target serious gamers, is a free service that allows gamers to integrate AOL Instant Messaging into their games as well as use free private servers to host their multi-player games.