You can now stream Steam from your PC to other, crappier computers in your home

It’s great to have a powerful PC gaming rig, but what if you want that same, high-fidelity experience on your crappy laptop? Well, with Steam In-Home Streaming, you now can.

Basically, Steam In-Home Streaming enables you to play games on one device while another handles all the computing. Right now, you can use a Windows PC as a home computer to stream to any Mac OS X, Linux, SteamOS, or other Windows device on the same network. Valve claims support for other operating systems is coming. Perhaps we’ll see Android and iOS support in the future?

“Any two computers in a home can be used to stream a gameplay session, and this can enable playing games on systems that would not traditionally be able to run those games,” Valve explains on its site. “For example, a Windows-only game could be streamed from a Windows PC to a Steam Machine running Linux in the living room. A graphically intensive game could be streamed from a beefy gaming rig in the office to your low-powered laptop that you are using in bed. You could even start a game on one computer and move to a more comfortable location and continue playing it there.”

This is an interesting feature, especially considering that Valve plans to release its own hardware soon. Steam Machines will plug directly into a TV, but the capability to stream Steam from your computer to any other device in your house could make the Steam Machine option less attractive to consumers. Of course, you could potentially use a cheaper, less-powerful Steam Machine as a streaming port feeding off of a powerful PC.