Gaming is fast becoming a differentiator in the competitive middleware market, a trend illustrated by Game Now, an on-demand gaming service offered by middleware vendor SeaChange International.

“As a company, we took a look around to see new opportunities,” said Tod Bouris, SeaChange’s senior director of game solutions. “Gaming was at the forefront. We’ve done a lot of middleware and client development and in-house IP, and we’ve come with a multi-pronged approach to gaming solutions."

Game Now is designed as a complete game management system with a consistent back office and application programming interface that companies can use to integrate it into their own middleware. The software-based product delivers both game downloads and streaming games to the set-top box, but the mode of delivery is not necessarily apparent to the user.

“As far the end user experience is concerned, they don’t know the difference,” Bouris said. “They pick any game they want and play it on demand. As far as the provider is concerned, they can set the business rules associated with gaming – rent for a day or a week or provide a subscription.”

In total, Game Now currently supports 100 games that operators can pick and choose from, including everything from Soduku to action games and shooters. The list is added to and refreshed every day, Bouris said.

The system has been in the works for two years but is just beginning to gain traction, a SeaChange spokesperson said. Verizon announced this month that it will be one of the first companies to integrate the necessary software into its own IP-based middleware in order to develop a DVD-based gaming platform for FiOS TV.

“As far as telcos are concerned, it is a natural point of differentiation,” Bouris said. “The network backend for many cable providers doesn’t support the higher quality games. With that, [they] cannot support the upstream bandwidth for the games.”

Game Now is not designed to directly compete with gaming console makers like XBox and Sony’s Play Station, Bouris said, but the two do not have to be mutually exclusive.

“We are trying to keep the eyeballs locked into the viewing experience that our providers are giving to the customers,” he said. “The idea is that people won’t be leaving their TV to go to the console. There is definitely room for both.”