There are really little differences between the way NoMachine, OnLive or Gaikai stream applications or games over the Internet. Looking at the details, one may argue that NoMachine has to provide a basic level of compatibility across a very large number of HW configurations, operating systems and applications, and so can't optimize the chain of operations required to produce the graphical output as aggressively as other operators can do by running games and applications in their datacenters. While this is certainly true, you must consider that:

• As a combination of the fact that the operations required to capture and produce a video from the content of the screen are more or less standard across all systems, and the fact that more and more people are becoming interested in enjoying media on a wider range of devices (phones, tablets, TV sets), consumer demand for real-time video encoding is booming. This is creating a market force pushing all device vendors to build this function in the silicon. Some CPUs and some GPUs can already encode high-quality real-time video in HW. NoMachine already uses these facilities, when available, basically removing the gap with solutions optimized to do the same on dedicated computers.

• While encoding the content of the screen in real time and pushing it efficiently on the network is, as of today, still a technical challenge, this technology is going to become mainstream in a few years from now (for example in the form of pushing a tablet screen to a big TV). But displaying the screen on a remote device is not enough to make a remote desktop system. Starting from the range of devices and applications a remote desktop system has to support, to the usability and security challenges, it's easy to find how remote-gaming or remote-display are just a small subset of the full remote-computing experience.

• While similar cloud-computing systems are about moving the computers to the network, NoMachine is about letting people do what they like with computers, including keeping them on the network they trust. In the light of the recent security and privacy scandals, this becomes even more important, whereas other technologies basically require that people outsource their computers and IT infrastructure to others.