Valve unveiled plans to add in-home streaming to Steam clients soon™. The service allows computers to seamlessly stream games to their network connected media pc. Valve opened up a Steam Group that is open to the public that wishes to be selected for the streaming beta tests. Read on for the full press release.
Many Steam game developers are currently working on native SteamOS titles, which will result in the best possible living room experience being delivered to their customers. In the meantime, we believe it’s important to make sure that the existing catalog of games is also available to Steam users in the living room. So we’d like to talk about in-home streaming, a way for people with good home networks to seamlessly play their Steam games anywhere in the house.
Steam in-home streaming will allow you to play a game on one computer when the game process is actually running on another computer elsewhere in your home. Through Steam, game audio and video is captured on the remote computer and sent to the players computer. The game input (keyboard, mouse or gamepad) is sent from the players computer to the game process on the remote computer.
Any two computers in a home can be used to stream a gameplay session and this can enable playing games on systems that would not traditionally be able to run those games. For example, a Windows only game could be streamed from a Windows PC to a Steam Machine running Linux in the living room. A graphically intensive game could be streamed from a beefy gaming rig in the office to your low powered laptop that you are using in bed. You could even start a game on one computer and move to a more comfortable location and continue playing it there.
If you want to get in on the action join the official Steam Group and cross your fingers.
