SteamOS Announced: Game Sharing, Media Streaming and Access Across Multiple Devices

After teasing three living room based announcements, Valve Software has revealed the first of the same: a Linux based OS called SteamOS. The OS will have a multitude of functions including streaming content to different living room devices such as your Mac or PC sharing your game library with different users and even streaming media through tie-ups with different content provides for movies, TV shows and more.

“As we’ve been working on bringing Steam to the living room, we’ve come to the conclusion that the environment best suited to delivering value to customers is an operating system built around Steam itself. SteamOS combines the rock-solid architecture of Linux with a gaming experience built for the big screen. It will be available soon as a free stand-alone operating system for living room machines.

“In SteamOS, we have achieved significant performance increases in graphics processing, and we’re now targeting audio performance and reductions in input latency at the operating system level. Game developers are already taking advantage of these gains as they target SteamOS for their new releases.”

The Family Sharing ability is easily the most interesting feature, especially given how the Xbox One’s same feature is currently defunct and the PlayStation 4 hasn’t announced a similar function. Essentially, different users will be able to play different titles, most likely through different profiles synced to the same account, and can even earn their own individual Achievements.

Valve reportedly has a ton of announcements for SteamOS with lots of games being prepared to take advantage of SteamOS. What are your thoughts on the same? Let us know below, and stay tuned for two more announcements from the developer in the coming days.