While the speed of light isn't getting any faster, bandwidth and hardware encoding both are (relative to the speed at which we're increasing resolution and image quality).

And the really nice thing about it is that you can afford to spend an order of magnitude on the hardware if it's shared around and played casually than if it just sits in your closet most of the time. And you can game on laptops or even mobile devices easily.

The experience could actually be fantastic, and hugely social; imagine reading a review with screenshots from the game, and clicking on them allows you to start to playing in under a second from that exact moment, just like you can send a YouTube link mid video.

The trouble is, there are a hell of a lot of cities in the world. In Chicago, everyone could be gaming like this in ten years; but in rural New Zealand?