[mosr]

Really interesting service.

Why might I use this instead of / in addition to Shadow (https://shadow.tech)? I'm a Shadow user, and they seem to give you beefier hardware at half the price, and it's a general purpose OS that will let you run any app (as opposed to "just" a browser).

[suhail]

Most people want an experience where the underlying OS and the application (the browser) interoperate seamlessly versus having to tame two desktop experiences. The primary application people think is slow is their browser by a wide margin so that's where we decided to focus as more native desktop apps become web apps. That focus lets us constrain the problems we get solve vs boiling the ocean with all of Windows.

Fwiw, we started by streaming Windows and pivoted away.

It's not clear to me that Shadow's business is sustainable. Windows licensing alone for virtualization across end-users if you buy from a reseller is $11/mo/user alone. I only know because we tried and became a reseller briefly. They also seem to use consumer GPUs that violate NVIDIA's licensing and agreements. Maybe they know something we don't.

[easton]

> They also seem to use consumer GPUs that violate NVIDIA's licensing and agreements

They claim to, in reality they are sliced Quadro/Tesla cards that get a GTX 1080's worth of performance. I was wondering about the Windows licensing myself, not clear how they got around that.

[chiefalchemist]

Perhaps the rotate (?) the licenses somehow? That is, not every subscriber is active all the time? Imagine it as the public computers at the library. Maybe?

In any case, even at $20 p/m it feels like a strong value. That ~$1000 every four years - without ever being stuck with an out of date machine.

[raggi]

Aren't VDA's cheaper?

[andrewguenther]

Yep, this is exactly what I was getting at. Shadow is one of many examples of application streaming services which aren't limited to the browser and offer similar hardware (or even flexible hardware) at a lower price point.

[kossTKR]

Shadow is absolutely incredible. I can stream 4K 60HZ with 10ms of latency to a datacenter in a country nearby.

I think they are close to bankruptcy though, and signing up takes ages.

[jensvdh]

+1 I love their service, it's flawless and I often forget I'm using a stream. Then again, I'm on a wired Ethernet connection and a fiber line within 5ms of the datacenter so that probably helps.

[kossTKR]

What's actually crazy is that i even ditched my Ethernet cable and is running on a ubiquiti amplfi 5ghz router, and there is seemingly no difference in my location at least.

Technology is amazing.

[kilroy123]

Interesting to hear this. I really want to use this service.

[ianwalter]

Isn't Shadow basically going out of business? Pre-orders aren't estimated to be available until October and I thought I read somewhere that they are selling off pieces of the business.

[steeve]

JB Kempf (of VLC) has been CTO for a few months. He has submitted an offer to buy back the company with Xavier Niel (telco billionaire).

Their tech is incredible, by far the best performing IMHO.

[bleuarff]

There are 2 competing offers to buy the company, as I know of. One from OVH founder Octave Klaba, the other from JB Kempf, of VLC fame. So no, I don't think it should go out of business - in the short term.

[np32]

From JB Kempf of VLC, and supported by Xavier Niel who is a huge VC in France and founder of Free, which totally disrupted the ISP mafia in France.

This video is a great interview of JB + story of Shadow https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0c1CJT8X8A&t=20s

[bleuarff]

Thanks for the additional info, I had forgotten Niel was the backer.

[ianwalter]

Thanks for clarifying. Seems like a lot of companies in this space (at least the ones geared towards gaming) have had to pivot.

[airstrike]

Looks like JB Kempf is the Shadow CTO

It's one great piece of tech, so I'm not surprised he'd be interested in trying to turn it around