In-homeStreaming
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$50 Steam Link streams PC games anywhere within your house
Along with a slew of new Steam Machines, Source Engine 2 and VR news, Valve announced an interesting add-on for anyone interested in in-home streaming for their PC games: Steam Link. These $50 boxes (in the US, international pricing is TBD) will stream content from your PC or Steam Machine, as long as they're on the same WiFi network. Adding a Steam Controller will cost an extra $50 when they launch in November, and can handle gaming in 1080p at 60Hz with low latency. Sony's Remote Play game streaming is a couple of generations old, while Microsoft just announced the feature for Windows 10, and now Valve has a cheap hardware solution too. The boxes were listed on the Steam store for a moment (see it in Google's cache here), and pictures showed a slim design, with three USB ports (one up front, two in the back) along with Ethernet, HDMI and power.
Gamers can now apply to beta test Steam's In-Home Streaming service
A big part of Valve's steamy vision of the future will be the ability to play full-fledged PC games on a relatively small living room machine, by streaming them to the Steam client from a main gaming PC in another room. (Much like Remote Play on the PS4 and Vita, or NVIDIA's GameStreaming from a PC to its Shield handheld.) Although the SteamOS and Steam Machine projects are still a long way off, Valve says it'll start beta testing of this particular feature by the end of this year. Testers will be randomly selected from among members of the relevant Steam Community group, so join up at the source link to put your name in the hat.
