LiquidSky is using 5G to explore the edge of cloud computing

 The next in a series profiling the startups and universities developing 5G use cases at Verizon’s 5G incubator at Alley in New York City

As wireless networks become more powerful, and more individuals and enterprises embrace mobility and a “digital first” approach to the ways they live, work, learn and play, cloud computing is considered by many to be the future of computing. Moving content away from the device and placing it “in the cloud” or “at the edge” of the internet where it can be accessed on demand can allow users to enjoy increasingly robust and immersive content on smaller, more mobile devices.

LiquidSky Software is guiding enterprise customers to the cloud with an interactive content delivery network (iCDN) that allows developers to stream their content across the cloud to almost any device – instantaneously and with very low latency. They also provide gamers the ability to stream their high-definition gaming library to their mobile devices, giving them on-demand access to their games without sacrificing game quality or performance.

“We enable you to use any app or game on any device,” says Ian McLoughlin, CEO and founder of LiquidSky. “You don’t buy a game console, you don’t buy a PC – you essentially stream it to your end device just like Netflix, YouTube or Spotify.”

Today, all that happens over a 4G LTE network. Tomorrow, next-generation networks will enable the delivery of even richer, more immersive, and more interactive content.

Verizon’s pre-commercial 5G technology at Alley is the window to next-gen networks

“The idea of running something somewhere else, and all you actually own locally is a very thin device that follows you around, that’s the future,” he says. “And for that future to happen, you need to have increasingly high bandwidth and low latency, and a great connection over the mobile network.”

For a glimpse into the future of that network, LiquidSky is using Verizon’s pre-commercial 5G technology at Alley, a co-working space and site of Verizon’s 5G incubator in New York City, to create high-quality cloud gaming experiences that eliminate the need for hardware platforms and wired connections. 5G’s super-fast speeds, massive bandwidth, and single-digit latency enabled LiquidSky to experiment with small form factor gaming devices playing fast-response, graphics-intense games that were actually residing on a server 20 miles away versus on the device itself. The 5G network’s high bandwidth and low latency allowed the huge data signals to travel from the device to the server and back near instantaneously, for the real-time reactions and responses necessary for the best gaming experience.

Seeing around the 5G corner

LiquidSky believes the future of content delivery won’t be linear – it will be more interactive and more compute intensive like the gaming content they’re experimenting with at Alley. They expect 5G will make that possible and will expand LiquidSky’s market potential.

“You need to be able to see around the corner at what the network’s doing next and how you can be positioned to utilize it in the best way possible,” says McLoughlin. “The only way to do that is to work with the company that’s innovating the fastest, and for us, Verizon has been that partner.”

Verizon’s 5G incubator at Alley is giving LiquidSky and other innovators access to pre-commercial 5G technology to develop and refine their 5G use cases.

Next week, learn how another startup named BriefCam is using 5G’s high bandwidth and speed to perform in-depth intelligent analytics of HD video to improve and understand the flow of cities, businesses and infrastructure.