OnLive will have to contend with a little more than just leery onlookers and lack of optimum internet infrastructure in a couple of months' time. Streaming games service Gaikai is now feature complete and due for a December, 2011 launch, according to the company's co-founder and CEO David Perry. While Gaikai can look ahead to the same challenges as its better-known and more experienced rival, its approach to cloud gaming is markedly different.

Gaikai will stream subscription-free game demos to Flash-capable web browsers. This is how the company describes the service on its website: “Just like publishers and developers, retailers pay by the minute for the time that games are streamed on their sites. Once the user finishes playing, they are directed to your store -- still high on the excitement of the demo -- to complete the sale. Giving visitors the chance to try games before they buy can help them overcome hestiation and can faciliate impulse buys.”

So it isn't really a direct rival to OnLive, at least not until it starts streaming full games, but things could change.

OnLive's cloud-based gaming service launched in June with Wi-Fi support conspicuously missing from its armory. While OnLive's lack of Wi-Fi support was never really a pressing concern for the vast majority of the world's population, it did matter to both the service's early adopters and detractors, with some admittedly ardent fans even stooping to such abject lows as building Ethernet loopback adapters to pass off their Wi-Fi connection as a wired one.

Such ingenuity is no longer needed as the company has now added beta Wi-Fi support to its cloud gaming service, just as it had promised at the beginning of the month. However, OnLive wants you to ensure that the wired Internet connection to your Wi-Fi router sustains at least 3 Mbps. Please read its  Wi-Fi FAQ for more.