With apologies to the console makers out there, I love the idea of streaming games over the Internet instead of playing them off a disc.

The reasons are fairly obvious: no more game discs and disc boxes cluttering your life or the environment; no more hokey how-to game manuals written by people who either can’t write or never played the game; no more of those unfair game-disc exchange policies where you get only a third of the disc’s worth in cash, regardless of the disc’s condition …

I’m sure you could think of others, but basically, if you’re a gamer, what’s not to love about a distribution and delivery system that puts titles like “Resistance 2″ on the screen as easily as dialing up “Seinfeld” on TV?

That’s the promise of OnLive, a new technology unveiled at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco this week. With it, gamers supposedly could play and interact with any title on their computers or TVs as easily as they would a console-based game.

The secret is a new form of data compression, seven years in the making, allowing gamers and game servers to interact over broadband connections in real time. Up to now, big honking games such as “BioShock,” “Halo Wars” and “Fallout 3″ had to be on disc because there was too much data in each for gamers to engage all at once.

OnLive apparently wowed ‘em in San Francisco — Game Guy pleaded with his boss to attend GDC but the boss said no, muttering something about travel-budget cuts — and has been a media darling as a result. I wonder though what they’re saying about it at Microsoft and Sony.

Probably not much that’s good. Especially since it wasn’t their idea.

You see, game discs are big business for the big corporations. Manufacture, packaging, distribution, sales — some part of everything goes into corporate pockets, ostensibly to address overhead expenses. The game publishers and distributors glean a little something extra, too; those discs are a form of advertising as well as media.

You’d think that removing some of these middlemen also saves money, and it would … unless you’re one of the people whose job is cut by downsizing. The key concept here, though, is profitability, and anyone who owns the means of distribution, in whole or in part, stands to gain some green from disc sales.

But Microsoft and Sony don’t own OnLine’s technology. Yet. Near as I can tell, they have no part of it. And that’s a problem for Microsoft and Sony. In the big-bucks world of video games, nobody is ready or willing to take a pay cut, especially during such a sour economy.

If OnLine’s technology is allowed to live up to its promise, we all might eventually say farewell to quirky systems such as Xbox 360, or expensive boxes such as PlayStation 3, preferring instead to play on our PCs or Macs or TVs. (I can envision this kind of technology being retooled for iPhone, too.)

Nintendo, meanwhile, might still have some breathing room; nobody at GDC said anything about Wii-type motion-activated games working with OnLine’s technology, though I’m sure somebody’s pondering the possibility.

In the meantime, expect Microsoft and Sony to try stealing OnLine’s stage, or maybe even buying the technology out from under it as a means of staying viable in video gaming. And if that happens, expect, too, for game prices to go up — maybe way up — to compensate for manufacturing and distribution profits that were lost in the decline of the game-disc industry. New technology never starts out as inexpensive for consumers, anyway.

I just hope that if Microsoft gets its hands around OnLine’s technology it doesn’t then brick my computer every six months.