I believe OnLive uses Flash or some other plugin to stream content.

As far as I can tell, the breakthrough that OTOY is claiming is this:

- They've developed a new video compression format and implementation that provides better compression ratios than h.264 [which implementation?].

- Their new format can be encoded very efficiently using a GPU-based encoder.

- Their encoder is very low-latency.

- They have a decoder written in JavaScript that can run in the browser.

- Their decoder is very low-latency.

All the cloud/streaming/remote desktop stuff is somewhat ancillary to this.