The alternative to buying one of Valve’s fancy Steam Machines for the living room is to use their new In-Home Streaming which lets you use a powerful machine to do all the work and stream it to another device.
It’s like having your very own cloud-gaming service in your home, and now it’s just entered beta among testers as Valve send out invites. Feedback has begun trickling in.
If you’ve got a beast of a desktop PC then you’d probably like to use it to power games you might be comfortable with playing in your living room, or bedroom.
In-Home Streaming turns your PC into a workhorse for the game you’re playing and then streams it across your home network to the device it’s twinned with, like a laptop that might be attached to your big ass flat screen TV. Valve already released some advisories for the feature like making sure you have a wired connection, as wireless won’t do.
Invites have now started to roll out to a select bunch but Valve intends to expand their pool of beta testers as time moves on. Some feedback has started coming in and right now it’s a service very much in beta with controls sometimes sticking or not responding comfortably.
”We’ve sent out invitations to development partners to try out the streaming beta. As we iterate we’ll add more and more people to the beta, so if you haven’t gotten your invite, stay tuned!” posted Valve.
In-Home Streaming is an entirely free service upgrade to Steam.
