Later today, Perlman–former principal scientist at Apple (AAPL) and the founder of WebTV–will officially unveil OnLive, the online service with which he hopes to upend the $46 billion world-wide videogame market. Seven years in the making, OnLive promises to create an on-demand gaming experience that rivals those offered by dedicated videogame consoles. It’s capable of streaming even the most advanced, CPU-intensive games to television and computer–Macintosh or PC–without lag or a reduction in quality. “We’re providing you with the latest high-end titles, the exact same ones you would see at Target or Best Buy, in the same release windows,” Perlman told USA Today. “But what is really cool is you don’t need any high-end hardware to play them. There’s no physical media. It’s an all-digital platform. You never need to upgrade your equipment at home.”

A compelling proposition. A potentially disruptive one too, if OnLive is able to deliver it with the reliability and ease of use it promises. Said IDC analyst Billy Pidgeon, “It’s a good idea and has potential, but the thing I need reassurance on is being able to deliver this over the network. In games there’s no wiggle room–when you press a button to fire you want to fire,” he said. “But if it works, this could be a disruptive.”

Now that venture capitalists are so taken with green tech, perhaps they can push some VC dollars toward the development of a greener data center. Because according to consultancy McKinsey, data centers are fast becoming the Superfund sites of the tech industry. McKinsey found that data centers are responsible for 0.3% of the world’s carbon-dioxide emissions. That’s about half of what the airline industry generates–and by 2020 it will surpass it.

“The more you look, the more you find that the entirety of the IT stack, from the CPU up, is very inefficient,” said William Forrest, the associate principal for IT at McKinsey. “Data centers are becoming a major business issue. We think it’s going to become a regulatory concern that will drive scrutiny not just in (corporate) boardrooms but with regulators as well.”

So what’s to be done? McKinsey proposes that corporations at least double the efficiency of their data centers by 2012 and adopt its Corporate Average Data Efficiency metric, a sort of fuel efficiency standard for IT. Said Forrest, “It’s miles per gallon for data centers.“