I never heard about this, but looking at the concept, photos, design... this was just waaay ahead of its time. It wanted to get rid of physical media in exchange for a montly fee.

More recently we have (had?) OnLive, but even they in a world of broadband, netflix and spotify, have been really successful at this. The virtual console (call it nintendo, psn or xbox live) has achieved "some" success, but still, nowadays to play thos games in the cloud (as Playstation offered with the vita and the ps4) hasn't been a real success.

For real performance, input lag and more, the local hardware must do everything, locally. Infinium Labs might have been able to pull this off back then, but again, the console would become obsolete a couple of years later, as it happens with regular PCs and regular consoles. Would the Phantom be upgradable? Or will the company behind replace it every few years? Will the customer have to pay for this upgrade?

It seems really complicated today, I can't imagine how complicated might have seemed 15 years ago.

I'm no fan of Steam, but their steam machines idea is a more refined concept. And the Steam Link seems like the most we'll be getting for a while. Either that or regular 20mbps connections everywhere, with low latency, for cloud gaming to succeed.