Steam client beta now has menus for 'In-Home Streaming'

One of the features unveiled by Valve during its SteamOS-related announcements was game streaming. The feature would essentially let users stream games from their main gaming PC to their Steam Machine. The fact that, while still incomplete, these features are showing up in the Steam client means that the launch date for SteamOS is getting closer. According to SteamDB , the latest version of the beta client for Steam has some mentions of “In-Home Streaming”.

However, currently, the menu is hidden away from all but the most tech savvy among us, and seems to currently be incomplete. When the feature is ready, players will be able to log in to multiple devices with their Steam accounts, and extra machines linked to their accounts will show up in the In-Home Streaming menu. However, logging in on multiple devices using the same Steam account isn’t supported right now, so the settings menu doesn’t work.

The menu is a bit incomplete right now

UI elements from SteamOS also seem to be popping up in the latest beta, which has more menus for things such as selecting a timezone, the option to go to the Linux desktop and the ability to start Steam in Big Picture mode by default.

There are four key features in the new OS that Valve hopes to deliver at launch: in-home streaming, music, TV and movies, family sharing and family options. With in-home streaming, you will be able to stream games from your PC to any device running on SteamOS over your home network wirelessly. Steam will also act as a media hub of sorts and will allow you to access your content wirelessly, much like in-home streaming.

Family sharing will let you share your game library with a specific PC. However, this does come with its own restrictions; only one person can access the library at any given moment. Family options will just be a suite of parental controls so that parents can manage what games their children can and cannot play.