You maybe aware that last week Valve rolled out one of the Key elements of the SteamOS/Steam Box combo, the In-Home Streaming feature. This will allow you to run higher spec or windows only games on your PC but play and control from the comfort of your living room. This bypasses the age old problem of having Windows games running on other OS’s.
This got me thinking about how Valve could reuse this functionality. Given that recent news hints at a suspected 1 Billion pitch for the video broadcasting website Twitch by Google/YouTube, perhaps online Streaming is a direction that maybe explored.
Broadcasting
What if Valve allowed streaming to external party sites such as Twitch?
It would cut out the middle-ware that can be a pain to configure, the popular X-Split incurs a subscription cost that isn’t ideal for gamers trying out streaming for the first time.
With the rise of E-Sports including Valves own DOTA 2, it may only be a matter of time until this comes to fruition as part of the Steam Interface, lifting restricts around games that allow streaming and have a Let’s Play Friendly stance to avoid that murky legal quagmire.
Future Use
Perhaps it could move a step further, why not allow every Steam user to enable a stream for their profile?
That way a quick visit to http://steamcommunity.com/id/welshtroll/stream/ would allow anyone to watch my stream via the web, via the client or Steam authentication chat can be easily managed.