If you were thinking about buying a $99 OnLive Game System, here’s some good news for you. If you pre-order THQ’s Homefront on OnLive for $50, you’ll get a voucher for a free MicroConsole and a free game. Not too shabby of a deal.

The deal runs through March 14th, and just so you know, supplies are limited, shipping costs extra, and you won’t actually receive the hardware until after the deal expires. It might not be a good sign for the company that it has to give away it’s console with this deal at such an early stage in it’s life, but either way you win.

It was supposed to arrive on January 15th, but who cares, the fact is that it is here now. Onlive has introduced PlayPack. For $9.99 a month you get unlimited access to a selection of titles. There’s no long-term commitment needed and your saved games will stay on servers for at least a full year after cancellation, if you back out and come back.

Right now there’s 38 games to choose from in all, including BioShock, Prince of Persia, and others. They have pledged more titles are on the way “on a regular basis.” Can they secure enough good titles on a daily basis to make this work? We hope so.

You might remember the hype about the Armada processor a while ago, where it was said to be showing up in a new gaming platform. The speculation at the time was that it was linked to the Nintendo 3DS and now we learn that the chip was used in the OnLive Microconsole.

How do we know this? Well some brave individual has torn down their unit and discovered the Marvell Armada inside, along with 512MB of RAM and other networking chips. They also found 1080p video playback capabilities, which means that OnLive can update it’s console to deliver Full HD content.

Word on the street was that OnLive would be getting into the streaming movie business. And why not? They are a streaming gaming service. However, the CEO of OnLive, Steven Perlman, has come out and said that the company is not aiming to compete with Netflix.

That’s good news for those who are buying the service. The company needs to focus on games and bolster up their somewhat meager games selection. It’s smart to just focus on games, at least for now.

OnLive has expanded its scope beyond gaming with plans to stream regular apps and websites to other devices. The company is targeting it at mobile users and showed apps and features running through the OnLive Viewer iPad client (free in the App Store) that wouldn’t have been possible otherwise. Users could Internet Explorer with Flash on Apple’s tablet, or even a high-end professional rendering app like Autodesk’s Maya.

The support would also extend to Android through a beta for the Samsung Galaxy Tab, and on all platforms it would support spectating on someone else’s session. However, collaborative editing isn’t possible with the current version, even though it hasn’t been ruled out.

Cloud gaming service OnLive and TV maker Vizio are discussing separate deals for subscription movie services of their own. OnLive is apparently committed to expanding to movies via subscriptions to go with their video games. Vizio is believed to be in talks for content.

This is an interesting move for Vizio since it already has access to Netflix and Vudu. It will be interesting to see what happens with both companies. Can Onlive compete with Netflix? Will Netflix have to get into gaming? Stay tuned.

OnLive is taking the Netflix approach to video games as it’s rolling out a flat-rate monthly pricing plan called PlayPack. It will cost $9.99 a month when it launches January 23rd, giving subscribers access to a catalog of forty retired and independent titles, including some games that are new to the OnLive service.

If you already bought the company’s $99 MicroConsole, you’ll get access to that catalog free until the formal launch, so you’ll have fourteen full games ready to play. You can pay month-to-month and cancel PlayPack at anytime and OnLive will still store your savegames for a full year in case you want to rejoin.

OnLive is cloud-based gaming service that lets players buy video games in digital formats. The players can then play the games from any computer with a web connection and the OnLive software installed. One of the catches to the service was that officially you needed to be on a wired connection to play.

OnLive has announced that it now has a beta WiFi wireless gaming option available for people to try out. If the user launches OnLive on a machine using a wireless connection it will be detected by the game app. The user will then get a prompt where they can choose Wi-Fi Beta to connect.

Now’s your chance to play a game here that’s actually running over there somewhere. OnLive announced today that it’s opening a public beta of its game streaming service. If you sign up on their website you will be asked for “general information about your ISP, your computer configuration and your location” so OnLive can build “test groups” of users working under varied conditions.

If you are chosen, you’ll get an invitation and a Performance Test. If your settings pass muster, you’ll be part of a Test Group and playing games in no time.

Gaming is a big business in the US and abroad in not only hardware sales, but also the games themselves can be huge moneymakers. Top-flight titles like Halo have outsold blockbuster movies and games continue to make big money even in the current economy.

The cloud-based OnLive gaming service was mentioned here this week and yesterday the guys from Gizmodo went hands on with the PC OnLive system playing Bioshock. Anyone who has seen Bioshock on the PC knows that the game is very graphically demanding.

If OnLive has anything to say about it, this could this be a console killer. Something that puts the Xbox 360, Playstation 3 and the Nintendo Wii six feet under. OnLive handles all the heavy graphics rendering on its servers and what you get is lag-free gaming as a video stream. IF it works as advertised.

You would use either your broadband-connected PC or Mac, or you could hook up the set-top box to your home theater, which features Ethernet, HDMI and USB. According to OnLive, the box costs “less than a Wii.” OnLive will be launching later this year.