Steam Launches In Home Streaming

[yourbeliefs]

Here's an interesting concept.. you can now stream your Steam games over your network to other computers. Everything is rendered on your "main" computer and then sent to whatever other computers you want. I don't see much of a use for this since if I'm going to game, it'll be on my main PC and not a laptop, but for other people this could be handy. I'm sure the hardware requirements are pretty stiff for optimal performance.

http://store.steampowered.com/streaming?snr=1_41_4__42

 

[yourbeliefs]

Well I just tried this, for about 3 seconds..

I was hoping that the streaming would be done as a background process, so that in theory, you could be doing something else on the computer you are streaming from, like watch a movie, while the stream was carried to the other computer. Turns out the host and client actually share the same screen. I found this out the hard way when I attempted to stream Duke Nukem 3D as a test and my 4 year old started crying because the Thomas and Friends she was watching on the host went silent and DN3D started displaying in the background. Obviously I had to abort the test after that. So really it seems like this isn't useful for me, as I can't imagine many scenarios where I'd rather play my games on my laptops as opposed to on my 50" Plasma on my couch. Maybe they'll fix this one day.