Microsoft streaming service called Rio?

It has been reported that Microsoft’s cloud-powered streaming service, formally known as Ridgeway, is now dubbed Rio.

The news comes from a Cnet source who claims that Microsoft demonstrated the service at a behind-closed-doors event, with Halo 4 being streamed to a Microsoft Surface tablet and Windows phone with “Xbox-level visual quality.”

“[Microsoft] 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,” said Windows blogger Paul 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.”

If Microsoft were to introduce a streaming service for the Xbox One to deliver Xbox 360 games, it would be a huge plus for the back-catalogue of great 360 games out there.

Xbox senior director Albert Penello has previously made mention of the possibility of using cloud-streaming for backwards compatibility purposes.

“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 Gaikai and delivering it to the box. We just have to figure out, over time, how much does that cost to deliver, how good is the experience.”