Steam Announces Beta Registration for In-Home Streaming

Steam has confirmed that the beta for its Home Streaming service will be opening later this year (even though there isn’t much left of this year.) Beta testers will be chose at random from the Homestream group in their forums.

If you’d like to sign up for the beta, simply click on the link above and join the group. Currently, there is no listed deadline to join before they start selecting testers; so I recommend signing up soon if you’d like to be a part of the beta.

More about In-Home Streaming:

You can play all your Windows and Mac games on your SteamOS machine, too. Just turn on your existing computer and run Steam as you always have – then your SteamOS machine can stream those games over your home network straight to your TV!        – Steam OS announce page

While the details on exactly how the service will work aren’t available, I interpret this to mean that you can have a PC set up somewhere in your home (a gameroom, for instance), and have a SteamOS machine or other PC running steam connected to your TV. Then you could host the game on your more powerful machine, and stream it to the one connected to your TV.

Valve’s Greg Coomer has a little more to say on the subject:

“So 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.

The prototype we’re talking about here is not meant to replace that. Many of those users would like to have a way to bridge the gap into the living room without giving up their existing hardware and without spending lots of money. We think that’s a great goal, and we’re working on ways to use our in-home streaming technology to accomplish it – we’ll talk more about that in the future.”