Valve's Steam OS will come along with many features including the ability to stream local games from one Steam equipped device to another. According to a post on the official In-Home Steaming user group on Steam, eligible (and lucky) users will soon be getting invites to try out the functionality.
Beta testing is listed as "coming soon," and those interested are being encouraged to join the Steam streaming group in order to become eligible. As anyone familiar with Valve's betas likely imagined, the first round of entrants will be chosen at random from the group.
We already know that the streaming functionality would likely allow SteamOS full access to native PC games, not to mention that ability for more powerful gaming rigs to host sessions and the ability to continue playing a game on another device.
Many are concerned about latency as well as hardware requirements for the streaming feature set, something Valve suggests is part of running the beta test. "There is a huge variety in home hardware and network configurations, and we would like your help in learning about what works best," says Valve.
The company has also released some graphs displaying the way it expects the service to work for different internet connections. It looks as though Gigabit Ethernet and fast wireless set-ups shouldn't have a problem bringing a solid experience, but slower or busy Wi-Fi networks could introduce some issues.
For eligibility into the beta tests head over to the Steam In-Home Streaming group and for data on system requirements for the streaming functionality, you can check out Valve's home network comparison graphs.