Pay and play by the hour

Soon you could be renting thrills by the hour

By BBC News Online technology correspondent Mark Ward

British broadband users can now rent computer games to see if they are any good before they lay out the cash to buy the full game.

This week, BT Openworld revealed details of its Software To Go scheme which lets people rent software by the hour, day or week.

This includes games, graphics packages, educational titles and even programs that let you design your garden.

The scheme is open to any broadband net user, not just those that have signed up with BT Openworld.

Latest and greatest

Since 25 July, BT has quietly been trialling a software rental system via its Openworld broadband portal that serves the customers who have signed up for its high-speed DSL service.

Invite fellow Sims around and stage a rodeo

Software To Go charges users a small fee to use programs they would otherwise have to pay full price for. All the software on offer can be played free for 10 minutes, but beyond that prices vary depending on how long a player wants access to a product.

As an example, Maxis' The Sims, in which players manage households of virtual people, cost £3.95 to play for a weekend or £7 for seven days.

Titles available on the BT service include Tomb Raider III, Deus Ex, Alone in the Dark, and The Sims among others. Currently 50 titles are on offer.

Fast cards

Technology company Exent is providing the infrastructure to support the rental service. Bruce Lawhorn, vice president of product management at Exent, said the service was proving very popular with people who wanted to do more with their broadband link.

You could design a garden like this

He said people were reluctant to pay a hefty monthly fee for high-speed access if all it meant was that web pages loaded faster and e-mail messages arrived quicker.

Mr Lawhorn said in order to avoid long download times, Exent had broken up the rentable programs into chunks that were streamed to a user's PC when they needed them. The chunks sat in the working memory of the user's machine and were never written to the hard disk, making the software almost impossible to pirate, he said.

The service scans the machines of anyone signing up to the rental service to see if any part of it needs to be upgraded to cope with the demands of the latest releases. "Many people are renting games just to see if their video card can handle them," said Mr Lawhorn.

The system does allow players to save their game and return to it later. However, currently, the saved games only work within the rental system. Mr Lawhorn said Exent was working on a way for players to export games in its format into full versions bought from a shop.