Valve Steambox

[schild]

Valve would be the last company I'd expect that to be a problem with - as such, I believe that even being a worry is totally unfounded.

[Teleku]

It would make sense for them to use Half Life 3 as a selling point for the Steam Box though.  Valve originally used Half Life 2 as a way to force everybody to install steam back in the day (back when I and everybody else I knew was very against this whole crazy 'no disk, digital download' thingy.  They only got away with it because HL2 was litterally the most hyped/expected game in history at that point, so valve had everybody by the balls.  I'm not sure if steam would have been the dominate success it is without them doing that (or at the very least, it would have taken them a lot longer to get to the point they're at now).

So, it would make sense for them to cash in on HL3 to give it a boost somehow.

[Yegolev]

Yes, it sure would make sense.

Instead of HL3:

[MrHat]

"You can play all your Windows and Mac games on your SteamOS machine, too. Just turn on your existing computer and run Steam as you always have - then your SteamOS machine can stream those games over your home network straight to your TV!"

Huh.  Wonder if any current consoles enable this.

[KallDrexx]

I wonder how the latency is over wifi.

[schild]

Deserves it's own thread.

[Quinton]

"You can play all your Windows and Mac games on your SteamOS machine, too. Just turn on your existing computer and run Steam as you always have - then your SteamOS machine can stream those games over your home network straight to your TV!"

Huh.  Wonder if any current consoles enable this.

Sony's doing it in the other direction with PS4 -> Vita or VitaTV.

But I don't think either they or Microsoft have ever discussed streaming PC content to the console.

[schild]

There's almost no way Microsoft would actually want to compete with Valve on the gaming front. Valve is loved. Microsoft is, ahem, boned.

End of the day, Valve gets to make all the plays here because no one really CAN compete with them. For Steam, and gaming in general, their coffers are basically bottomless at this point. Also they have the largest delivery platform for _actual_ games on the planet. They get to make all the plays, other people are off dicking around on another court.

Sony has their own ecosystem - but even Valve plays nicely with them. Maybe we'll see Sony TVs with built-in Steam TV some time in the future.

[Samwise]

I wonder how the latency is over wifi.

You've gotta think that being local it'll be orders of magnitude than that thing where you're streaming everything over your Internet connection (the name'll come to me right after I hit Post), and that thing was allegedly very close to playable.

[Paroid]

I watched someone at work playing an FPS on OnLive a couple days ago. The latency didn't seem to be a big issue.

Wired lan delay is sub millisecond, so it shouldn't be an issue when you have 16 milliseconds to display the next frame. Wireless lan can have latencies around 5 or 10 milliseconds if there's some interference, but I don't see that as a problem as far as input goes. The real issue is how fast the video output can be compressed and decompressed. Given how easy it is to stream from your computer to a service like Twitch (And how many extra cores modern PCs have to do the encoding work), I think the most common problem you'll have is figuring out how to set your big screen into game mode to get it's signal latency down to something reasonable.

Oh, here is a reasonably recent article on TVs with some latency numbers: http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-33199_7-57587317-221/game-mode-on-cnet-tests-tvs-for-input-lag/. Yep, it looks like the vast majority of the latency apparent to the user is going to come from that.

[KallDrexx]

Do Twitch and OnLive support 720p streaming?

[Paroid]

I think Twitch is primarily 720p streaming. I didn't check the resolution when we were playing with OnLive, but I didn't notice any video compression artifacts on the big screen, so it was probably about that resolution, as I can definitely tell on Twitch when I'm viewing at 480p.

[Fordel]

Twitch can do 1080 or whatever the insane one is, it's just most streamers don't have the upload to actually stream that themselves.

[Kageru]

... does anyone actually want on-live though? Their library was small, their prices not that great and they'll always have some degree of latency / bandwidth issues. And from memory the other secret was they were bleeding money to offer that service.

I'd rather buy a console or HTPC Steambox. The streaming from PC is just a freeby and bonus for early adaptors when the library is thin.

[K9]

When they say that this will stream dirct to your TV, does this mean something like Chromecast or AppleTV? Because if so, I'm already sold; we're trying to eliminate all the wires at home because our TV is wall-mounted and wires are an eyesore. The lack of wireless streaming for the PS5 or Xbone is a real nuisance.

[Goreschach]

They mean it will stream video from your main PC to the steambox. Unless you have some kind of wireless dongle thingy to stream from the steambox to your tv, you'll still need to plug the steambox into the tv.