After a closed beta earlier this year, PlayStation Now, Sony’s game streaming service, has entered open beta in the UK. Anyone with a PlayStation 4, PlayStation 3 or certain Sony Bravia TVs or Blu-ray players can stream classic PS3 titles to their device over the internet.
Unfortunately, unlike the US version of the service, PS Now in the UK currently only supports rentals. While US users can pay $20 a month (around £13) for unlimited access to the entire PS Now library, UK users will have to pay between £2.99 and £7.99 to rent games for either two or 30 days. Sony has promised the subscriptions will come to the UK later this summer, but has not revealed pricing.
Games offered during the open beta include Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, The last of us, God of War: Ascension, Bioshock infinite, Final Fantasy XIII, Tomb Raider underworld, Ultra Street Fighter IV, dead space 3and Mirror edge. In an effort to entice people to use the service, Sony is also offering free Dualshock 4 controllers and 30-day free rentals (of a limited selection of six games) to anyone who buys a 4K Bravia TV before August 31.
While it took Sony a while to make the most of its $380 million Gaikai acquisition in 2012, PS Now has been largely well-received since its open beta began late last year. When we tried the service in the US, we found it worked extremely well on connections above 9 Mbps, with acceptable input lag and high-quality compression. However, connection speeds below that did suffer from issues.
US users can also access the service from non-Sony devices, including a selection of Samsung TVs. Ars’ own Ron Amadeo, who happened to own one of those TVs, tested the service and was equally impressed with the latency and quality.