G-cluster is a

Finnish Finnish may refer to: * Something or someone from, or related to Finland * Culture of Finland * Finnish people or Finns, the primary ethnic group in Finland * Finnish language, the national language of the Finnish people * Finnish cuisine See also ...

cloud gaming provider. Initially founded by Erik Piehl in 2000, it has been wholly-owned by subsidiary of

SoftBank is a Japanese multinational conglomerate holding company headquartered in Minato, Tokyo which focuses on investment management. The Group primarily invests in companies operating in technology, energy, and financial sectors. It also runs the Vi ...

since 2004. It uses

IPTV Internet Protocol television (IPTV) is the delivery of television content over Internet Protocol (IP) networks. This is in contrast to delivery through traditional terrestrial, satellite, and cable television formats. Unlike downloaded med ...

set-top box A set-top box (STB), also colloquially known as a cable box and historically television decoder, is an information appliance device that generally contains a TV-tuner input and displays output to a television set and an external source of sign ...

es for its service. Their target audience are console gamers. G-cluster's

business model A business model describes how an organization creates, delivers, and captures value,''Business Model Generation'', Alexander Osterwalder, Yves Pigneur, Alan Smith, and 470 practitioners from 45 countries, self-published, 2010 in economic, soci ...

was introduced in the article "Developing Cloud Business Models: A Case Study on Cloud Gaming" of the ''IEEE Software Magazine'' in July/August of 2011. Some of the first implementations of cloud gaming as a gaming-on-demand technology were introduced by G-cluster. The first commercial roll-out of the service was for

CYTA CYTA Ltd. (; short for "Cyprus Telecommunication Authority"; gr, Αρχή Τηλεπικοινωνιών Κύπρου (ΑΤΗΚ), ''Archí Tilelikoinonión Kýprou (ATIK)'' ) is a telecommunication provider in Cyprus. The Cyprus Telecommunicat ...

in 2005 on their IPTV network. In March 2008, G-cluster announced HD support in their solution with Amino IPTV STB. In November 2010, after thorough beta testing, French operator SFR launched a commercial service based on G-cluster technology. G-cluster signed content acquisition deals with game studios around the world, including

Electronic Arts Electronic Arts Inc. (EA) is an American video game company headquartered in Redwood City, California. Founded in May 1982 by Apple employee Trip Hawkins, the company was a pioneer of the early home computer game industry and promoted the ...

Ubisoft Ubisoft Entertainment SA (; ; formerly Ubi Soft Entertainment SA) is a French video game publisher headquartered in Saint-Mandé with development studios across the world. Its video game franchises include '' Assassin's Creed'', ''Far Cry'', ...

, Sega,

Gameloft Gameloft SE is a French video game publisher based in Paris, founded in December 1999 by Ubisoft co-founder Michel Guillemot. The company operates 18 development studios worldwide, and publishes games with a special focus on the mobile games ma ...

, Disney, and Warner. Between 2010 and 2016, Erik Piehl (President and CTO) and Sevan Kessissian (SVP Business and Content Strategy) took the lead of the company received investments from the largest Telecom carriers in the world including Orange, SFR, and NTT. In July 2016, G-cluster was acquired by the Broadmedia Corporation.

References

External links

* https://www.broadmedia.co.jp/en/ Cloud gaming Cloud gaming companies {{videogame-company-stub