PlayStation Now is a neat little service. Sony purchased Gaikai a few years ago and turned it into a way to play PlayStation games without necessarily having a PlayStation. If you have a compatible set top box and a PlayStation controller, you can subscribe to the service and stream PlayStation 3 games to your TV over the Internet—basically PlayStation-as-a-service.

The biggest problem with the service has been the limited ways to get it. Sony has been intent on being Sony and locking down PlayStation Now to people with Sony hardware. In the past, PS Now has been limited to the PlayStation 3, 4, Vita, or the purpose-built PlayStation TV microconsole. Recently though, Sony has announced it is opening up the platform to Sony Smart TVs and—in a particularly interesting move— non-Sony Smart TVs . My Samsung "H7150" Series Smart TV from 2014 recently got the PlayStation Now update, so we decided to see what the service was like with no boxes whatsoever.

The previous PS Now platforms—the PS 3, 4, Vita, and TV—have all been capable gaming systems in their own right. My Samsung Smart TV, on the other hand, is so woefully underpowered it can barely scroll through its own menus. You can press down on a button, lift your finger up, and move over to a new button before the first press is registered on the screen. I tried to load Ars Technica on the browser before and it just froze. I'm very happy with the important part of my TV—the screen and inputs—but the Smart TV portion is one of the worst computing experiences I've had in some time. Now, Sony is telling me this technological disaster is going to start pumping out Playstation 3 games?! I had serious doubts.

Getting started

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo



Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

PlayStation Now is an app on my Smart TV software, so after a quick download, we were up and running. We needed both a Samsung Account (for the PlayStation Now app download), and a Sony Account (for buying games), which was a little clunky. We were particularly interested in how the controller was going to work. The Dual Shock 3 controller can work with PlayStation Now—which makes sense, given that these are PS3 games—but it only works with select Sony platforms. The only controller that would work with my TV was the Dual Shock 4 controller from the PS4.

Pairing is a little rough. The PlayStation Now software presents a dead end dialog that basically says, "Go look up how to do this on the Internet." After grabbing a laptop and looking up the instruction, I had to close the PS Now software and just had to hunt through my TV's menu. After finding the Bluetooth device pairing option and putting the PS4 controller into bluetooth pairing mode, the two got along just fine. The other option was to plug a MicroUSB cable into the TV and the controller.

Loading a game takes about a full minute. Things are a little clunky when the game is loading, too—the screen displays the PS Now loading screen, then flashes to black, then back to PS Now, then to black, then PS Now again, then finally the game splash screens appear. It's a little alarming the first time you see it.

Performance

For all my complaining about my Smart TV's performance, PlayStation now runs amazingly well! Starting the service seems to completely unload the on-board Smart TV software to the point that the power button on the TV doesn't even work in the PS Now app. On most smart devices you would expect an app to run on top of the operating system, but the Smart TV software is completely off, and PS Now takes over the whole TV.

Once PS Now launches, you can immediately feel the difference. Arrowing through the menus, which used to be a slow, sluggish process, is now fast and snappy. PlayStation 3 games actually start, and run, and run well. The whole experience was a level of performance I didn't know my Smart TV was capable of.

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Granted, the games aren't actually running on the TV. Everything is being processed in the cloud and video and audio is streamed to the TV, making all of the in-game action dependant mostly on your Internet connection. You might have done some "live" video streaming before, like Twitch.tv, but PS Now is a whole different animal. Even "live" video is buffered for a few seconds, so you have not only this frame, but probably the next few hundred frames as well. PS Now is truly live, though. You're getting this exact frame at this second and you need to pull the next one down live, too. Any tiny hiccup in your Internet connection will result in skipped audio or a dropped frame.

The latency is really impressive. Even on action-y games like Street Fighter, you'd be hard pressed to notice that the game isn't native. Sony recommends a 5Mbps hardwired connection, but we ignored that and did Wi-Fi anyway, and it worked fine. We did run into a single "bad connection" session that had some screen tearing, but after exiting and relaunching the game, everything was fine.

PlayStation Now turned my Smart TV into a fun, useful device

I was really impressed with PS Now on my Smart TV. It took a computing platform that I thought was so slow it was useless and turned it into a fun gaming device.I was playing actual PS3 games on my TV and, to be honest, didn't really notice that it wasn't a local game.

The biggest downside to PlayStation Now is that it's just so darn expensive—the rentals especially. $5 for four hours with Street Fighter? That's crazy! There's also a $19.99-a-month subscription (or $44.99 for three months) that gives you access to over 100 games.

Sony just took a big step forward with PS Now, though. This is one of the first times you've been able to (legally, at least) play Sony games on non-Sony hardware. With the subscriptions and rentals, it makes a ton of sense to us. Since the service will apparently run on even the most anemic hardware, why is PlayStation Now so limited in device compatibility? Sony should have a million clients out there for everything with a screen and bluetooth controller, making PS Now the gaming version of Netflix. For now Sony's official "devices" page lists every client for PlayStation Now as an "Open Beta," including my Smart TV, so maybe when it's time for an official "non-beta" version, there will be wider platform support.