Patent ID: 8881215

Claim:
A computer-implemented method comprising: receiving a request from a client of a user to execute a video game or application; generating control signals from the client in response to an input device of the client being actuated by the user as the user is playing the video game or using the application; receiving the control signals and responsively executing the video game or application on a server at a hosting service center, the execution of the video game or application producing a low-latency interactive compressed video stream comprising a plurality of video images; detecting a maximum data rate of a communication channel between the server and the client; detecting channel characteristics of the communication channel between the server and the client, the detected channel characteristics including a supported bitrate of the communication channel; encoding each video image of a sequence of the video images using a first compression format or a second compression format based on the detected maximum data rate, wherein a first video image in the sequence of the video images is encoded using the first compression format and one or more subsequent video images are encoded using the second compression format, wherein encoding of the sequence of the video images is performed using low latency compression to generate the interactive compressed video stream based on the detected channel characteristics; transmitting compressed video images that have more data than can be transmitted at the supported bitrate of the communication channel in one image time over one or more additional image times, and ignoring one or more subsequent uncompressed video images while still transmitting one of the compressed video images that have more data; and decoding the compressed video images and rendering the decoded video images on a display of a client; wherein operations of generating control signals, receiving the control signals at the server and responsively executing the video game or application, encoding the sequence of video images, transmitting the compressed video images, and decoding and rending the decoded video images on the display are performed with a latency such that the user has the perception that the video game or application is responding instantly to the control signals.