I'm pretty sure that none of you have ever imagined that, at some point in your life, you'll be able to access your video game consoles (regardless of the type and manufacturer) from pretty much any location where a broadband Internet connection is available. Well, that moment has apparently arrived, since a company called Spawn Labs has created a system that will allow users to do exactly that, in a very simple and fast manner.

This system is formed out of several components, out of which the Spawn HD-720 box is the most important. So, once the Spawn HD-720 has been connected to a console and configured properly, users will be able to play games in any location where there's a wired or wireless access to your home broadband network. The Spawn HD-720 works with the Xbox 360, the Xbox, the PlayStation 3, the PlayStation 2 and the GameCube and a single Spawn HD-720 can be connected to one or two consoles, being able to provide remote game play access to one of the two consoles at a time.

Now, as expected, you'll need a PC in order to play the games, because, in fact, this is what the system from Spawn does – “stream” the whole gaming experience to a computer system. For this purpose, one will also require the other components of the package, namely the Spawn Gamepad Adapter, the Spawn Player (a piece of software installed on the computer), and the Spawn Labs website.

The quality of the streaming will depend directly on the available amount of bandwidth, but, in ideal conditions, the device will send out 720p video at 30 fps. Latency is also pretty low when using a home LAN network, but changes dramatically when playing over the Internet. So, the average end-to-end latency is of approximately 100ms, while in less than perfect conditions, some additional latency is introduced, often ranging from about 25 to 50ms.

Additionally, the Spawn HD-720 supports PCM and AAC-LC stereo audio, and streams the sound from a game console to the Spawn Player, much like it streams video. AAC-LC audio is generally preferable as it requires less bandwidth for comparable quality, and you can choose different audio quality settings from 64Kbit/sec to 256Kbit/sec per channel (stereo is 2 channel).

Last, but certainly not least, we'll also have to mention the fact that the Spawn Player has built-in support for the native console game pads for the Xbox 360 and the PS3, and should work pretty well with just about any gamepad (or even original gamepads, via the appropriate adapters).

Pricing for the Spawn HD-720 is quite a good one, namely just around 200 US dollars, users having to cough up an additional 30 US dollars for each specialized gamepad adapter.


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