The first of three announcements from Steam has been revealed: SteamOS, a Linux-based operating system that will be free and stand alone for living room machines. If there was still any doubts that Steam was working on a Steam Box, they’re all pretty much out the window now.
SteamOS will bring four new features to the living room including in-home streaming, family sharing, family options, and music, TV and movies. In-home streaming is undoubtedly the most interesting feature announced, as Steam claims that gamers will be able to play all their Windows and Mac games on their SteamOS machines too. Simply turn on the existing computer and run Steam, then have the SteamOS machine stream the content over the home network and onto the TV.
The company also announced that SteamOS will have significant performance increases in graphics processing and will be targeting audio performance and reductions in input latency at the operating system level. In other words, Steam is essentially developing an operating system with strictly gaming in mind. Backed by its millions of users, it won’t be a surprise to see SteamOS become “the next big thing” especially since developers will have little reason to not embrace the technology.
More information on SteamOS is expected in the coming days, but the operating system will be a free download for users and will be a freely licensable operating system for manufacturers. In other words, there might be a lot of “Steam Boxes” heading our way.
Source: Steam
