Bright Canopy – Ciaran Laval

September 2, 2015

Bright Canopy Get The Notion That Customers Might Tip The Boat Over

Bright Canopy, the company behind running Second Life (and OpenSim) in a web browser, recently announced that they were ready for launch. An inital price of $17.00 a month was announced, with an advisory that this may change if demand exceeded expectations.

Linden Lab then blogged about the service :

This weekend, an exciting new service is launching: Bright Canopy. With Bright Canopy, you can use either the official Second Life Viewer or the Firestorm Viewer to access Second Life in your web browser, and you can enjoy great performance and graphics, without a high-spec PC.

Customers flocked to the ship on the ocean, sailing with an inventory of love and devotion for the bold new product. Alas, it quickly became apparent to the Bright Canopy that customers weren’t just going to rock the boat, they were going to tip the boat over. This was of course not the desired outcome, forcing the Bright Canopy team to blog; We’re Gonna Need A Bigger Boat :

We’ve had so much response that we are going to have to make a change and offer a different plan to make sure we are sustainable and can be around long enough to take advantage of much more affordable hosting options from Frame in a few months.

New signups were put on hold and Bright Canopy were transparent about what had happened :

We burned through our contingency in a few hours. We tried modifying some things, but it just wasn’t something that could be fixed with a knob. We talked over our options and looked at the numbers. In order to be able to offer a service of any sort, we knew we would have to make changes.

There will be a limited time offer of a $10 credit for the first month, meaning the first month will be $7. This is our way of thanking you for bearing with us. This offer expires 12AM SLT on Sunday, September 6th. After that, each month will be $17. The plan comes with 20 hours, and additional time is available for $0.013 per minute.

This isn’t what we planned, and making the change is hard, but we believe it is the only way to keep this service available for the people who need it.

One thing was very clear, there was a larger demand for this service than had been anticipated.

Continue reading “Bright Canopy Get The Notion That Customers Might Tip The Boat Over”

August 18, 2015

Bright Canopy To Launch August 29th With Experimental Pricing Plan

Bright Canopy, seen by many as the successor to the SL Go from Onlive, have announced that they will be officially launching on August 29th :

After much work and preparation and tremendous help from the community testing our offering, we are proud to announce the launch of the full Bright Canopy service.

LAUNCH DATE: August 29th

EARLY BIRD PRICE: $17 per month*

BRING A FRIEND: Sign-up a friend and both you, and your friend, earn free time.

EAST COAST CLOUD: We will also be adding a brand-new, US. East Coast cloud, for faster ping times!

The asterisk next to the price is important, because the pricing will initially be experimental.

In the blog post, Bill Glover explains :

Our early bird price is going to be an experiment for 90 days. If you’ve been following the blog, you know we’ve seen price fluctuations on the back end, and we still need to watch actual usage of the service. $17 is a sustainable price if the instance costs return to their typical, historical values. It is not a sustainable price with the current spike in instance price. We may need to get creative with how we split instances, or we may need to raise prices. We intend to remain transparent as always and will keep you posted. Our goal is to continue to maintain a sustainable, affordable service.

The transparency here regarding the pricing is something to be admired. Pricing has been seen as the big barrier to streaming services such as Second Life. Pricing was something that SL Go from OnLive struggled with and it’s something that even the Lindens have admitted is tricky when it comes to offering streaming services.

At SL12B Linden Lab CEO Ebbe Altberg was asked about Linden Lab providing a streaming service, his reply put the issue of pricing firmly at the heart of the discussion :

Streaming (render on the server) is interesting but the issue is cost. The day will come but we’re not there yet. Between nVidia, Amazon, Microsoft etc. hopefully the competition will drive pricing down soon to make it something we can offer at a price that users are willing to pay to make it worthwhile.

Therefore the approach from Bright Canopy is most definitely a sensible one.

Continue reading “Bright Canopy To Launch August 29th With Experimental Pricing Plan”

April 13, 2015

Bright Canopy Beta Testing Frame For Second Life Streaming In A Web Browser

SL Go from OnLive is of course going, but the ideas behind it and the fact that there are Second Life and OpenSim users who would like to see a similar service developed has been discussed. In my previous post I looked at the work Nebandon Izumi had compteted with regards to getting the OnLook Viewer working with Amazon AppStream for OSGrid.

However there are other people looking at options regarding this too and one of them is Bright Canopy who state :

We render SL on powerful machines and stream it straight to your device

Android, iOS, Chromebook, Mac, Linux, anywhere

Say hello to freedom

Bill Glover of Bright Canopy, has been commenting on Inara Pey’s recent blog post. Bill has also setup a blog : Bright Canopy Blog. The blog so far has a total of two posts, but both of them are absolutely fascinating when it comes to streaming Second Life.

His first blog post was : Notes on Streaming SL With Amazon AppStream, which contained a report of trying to get Second Life working with Amazon AppStream. Although it did work, Bill summarised the experience as :

I’m in a hotel room in Reno for a conference, but I’m grabbing what time I can to do some quick proof of concept stuff.

I setup a stream with the Firestorm and was able to use it from both a Chromebook and an Android phone. It was really very responsive over a hotel wifi network, but there are many caveats.

tl;dr: It works, but it’s expensive and nowhere near being useful for just casually streaming SL without some custom client development and viewer integration.

The link to the blog post has a lot more information and is definitely worth a read. However Bill didn’t hang up his pen there, he’s actually moved on to a second experiment : And Then There Was Frame.

Continue reading “Bright Canopy Beta Testing Frame For Second Life Streaming In A Web Browser”