The call for a unified gaming platform sent ripples through the industry last month, if only because it stemmed from EA, the world's largest videogame publisher. Dredging up fearful comparisons to Infinium Labs' ill-fated Phantom, it seems such an idea is still a long way off... or maybe not.

Revealing a setup that promises to provide PC games to any standard set-top box, t5 Labs today announced details about its unified gaming platform that it hopes to release to network providers.

Dubbed 'Instant Gaming', the virtual games console technology works similarly to the Remote Play option between PS3 and PSP (currently only poorly demonstrated with Factor 5's otherwise forgeable Lair) or video-on-demand services, essentially transmitting MPEG compressed video footage of the game from remote servers to set-top boxes. The games and t5 Labs software are maintained on central servers, meaning that consumers need only a compatible set-top box and no software.

Such an approach seems to be a viable if ambitious prospect for gaming, potentially opening up videogames to a significantly larger audience. Given today's press release citing investment into American networks and claims of operators providing 20, 50 and "in many cases" 100Mbit of bandwidth, we remain slightly sceptical about the planned roll-out when it's hard enough to maintain a steady 8Mb connection in the UK at least - which may pose a few issues for HD quality footage.

Regardless, t5 Labs seem confident that latency won't pose too much of an issue, with claims that the company's technology that vastly accelerates the compression time between game and video footage results in a 50-80% reduction in processing time. As Graham Clemie, t5 Labs founder and CEO pointed out:

"Many people already enjoy playing online games. In some ways, latency with Instant Gaming will be less. Instead of connecting across the public Internet to perhaps the sole server in a country, in our case, the service will effectively be run over a private network, owned and operated by network operators and hosted at several sites across each country. The physical distance will be far lower and the operator can optimise their routers to prioritise the Instant Gaming traffic."

Any such doubts that the technology is too early to gain serious industry support are countered by claims that the t5 Labs are already beginning to amass interest from developers and publishers, along with the heavyweight support of IBM.

"I've been at the forefront of the gaming industry for almost 25 years and there are very few occasions that I've seen something truly ground-breaking. When I heard what t5 labs were offering I was understandably sceptical, but on learning more I became incredibly excited by the potential of this technology to revolutionise and broaden the gaming market," Philip Oliver, CEO of Blitz Games

TVG will be discovering more on t5 Labs Instant Gaming technology soon, keep your eyes peeled for further details on this intriguing concept soon.