Xbox streaming service called Rio - Report

GameSpot sister site CNET has heard from a source that Microsoft's recently revealed cloud-powered streaming service is called Rio. Its former codename was Ridgeway, another source said.

During Microsoft meetings last week, the company reportedly demonstrated Halo 4being streamed to a Surface tablet and a Windows Phone. This was achieved at "Xbox-level visual quality," CNET's source said.

Noted Windows blogger Paul Thurrott added some additional insight on Rio, based on information from his own sources.

"The firm noted that latency was down to 45 milliseconds, which is probably OK for simple single-player gaming but is in fact pretty high for real-time multiplayer gaming," Thurrott said on his site. "But here's a secret benefit of this technology: Microsoft might use this to solve the backward-compatibility problem of the Xbox One, which cannot play Xbox 360 games: It could simply stream these titles to customers. In the future. Maybe."

Microsoft hinted at tapping into the power of the cloud for backward compatibility on the Xbox One earlier this month.

"There are so many things that the servers can do. Using our Azure cloud servers, sometimes it's things like voice processing. It could be more complicated things like rendering full games like a Gaikai and delivering it to the box," senior Xbox director Albert Penello said at the time. "We just have to figure out, over time, how much does that cost to deliver, how good is the experience."