Steam in-home streaming enters open beta

Steam in-home streaming has been around for about six months now and is set to be one of the main selling points for Valve's upcoming Steam Machines. Up to this point, in-home streaming has been in closed beta but now the flood gates have opened and anyone who opts-in the the Steam client beta will have access to the feature.

Valve has been improving in-home streaming over the last few months in an effort to turn it in to a stable solution for playing games in another room, now that it has entered open beta, maybe it has come close to succeeding. The last few updates have touched on some key areas such as:

• Revamped architecture to support many more games and improve responsiveness
• Adjusted controller dead zone for mouse emulation mode to reduce cursor drift
• Added hardware accelerated encoding via Intel QuickSync
• Added a 30 Mbit bandwidth option
• Updated latency display to more accurately reflect streaming latency

So if you're like me and have had access to the beta for a while but haven't really gone back and tried it out for the last month or two, then maybe now would be a good time to test it out again and for those who didn't get in to the closed testing stages, now you can give it a shot. I've had varied degrees of success with the feature myself but maybe Valve's more recent improvements will have fixed the few issues I was having.

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KitGuru Says: In-home streaming does have its uses but it won't be useful to everyone. Have any of you guys tried out the feature? If so, how did it perform for you? 

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