This is perfect for those already with ”great gaming hardware” at their disposal. Closed beta testing for In-Home Streaming will commence within the next two months.
How does one join this inexorable march into the future? Simply join the official Steam In-Home Streaming community group for a chance at being selected.
”Steam In-Home Streaming is a feature that will allow people to stream games from one computer to another anywhere in their house,” blurbs the group. ”This feature will be available for beta testing later this year. Beta participants will be randomly selected from members of this group, so join, have fun, and stay tuned for more details!”
It’s kind of like running your own Cloud gaming service (OnLive) where your PC rig does all the work and pipes the game through to whatever device you’ve got hooked up, like a mini-PC rigged to living room TV. All control input is then fed back to the PC, which means Valve is working extra hard on eliminating latency.
”High-powered SteamOS living room machines are nice, and fun to play with, and will make many Steam customers happy, but there are a lot of other Steam customers who already have perfectly great gaming hardware at home in the form of a powerful PC,” said Valve’s Greg Coomer.
SteamOS is to be released for free to anyone who wishes to install it - you don’t need a Steam Machine.