As you admit yourself you can't do anything about network lag and reliability. Even if you get down to 0ms video enc-dec this will be not viable for any games where the camera moves.
Also did a 3 hour raid night on the new Legion content with it on WoW, lot of dynamic camera movement there. Cleared Nythendra on Heroic as the 4th DPS.
May not be to everyone's liking, but worked for me.
While the speed of light isn't getting any faster, bandwidth and hardware encoding both are (relative to the speed at which we're increasing resolution and image quality).
And the really nice thing about it is that you can afford to spend an order of magnitude on the hardware if it's shared around and played casually than if it just sits in your closet most of the time. And you can game on laptops or even mobile devices easily.
The experience could actually be fantastic, and hugely social; imagine reading a review with screenshots from the game, and clicking on them allows you to start to playing in under a second from that exact moment, just like you can send a YouTube link mid video.
The trouble is, there are a hell of a lot of cities in the world. In Chicago, everyone could be gaming like this in ten years; but in rural New Zealand?
IIRC, Gaikai was aiming for that exact application (live game demos) before they got acquired by Sony.
I found some people on dslreports forums with Comcast's DOCSIS 3.1 service, and their ping times were around 15ms to a local server, which is still ok enough.
The upgrade process is gong to be slow, but 4 years after OnLive died, there's a significantly higher number of people who have a good enough connection to use it. It sounds like there's a lot of improvement on the server side too, as well as in hardware assisted compresison/decompression. Monitors have also been encouraged to decrease processing latency too, and everything adds up.
That said, 15ms network latency isn't too bad at all, considering that it takes your TV 40-80ms to display a frame through HDMI. Fortunately, with the advent of VR display manufactures finally took notice of this built-in lag. So that's getting better, too.