Valve has announced SteamOS today, a free, Linux-based operating system "designed for the TV and the living room".
This is the first of the 3 announcements Valve will make this week, all related to bringing Steam into living rooms, with the next one to follow in 48 hours, as THIS page points out.
SteamOS will feature:
- in-home streaming: the SteamOS machine can stream the games over your home network to your TV;
- music, TV and movies;
- family sharing: share the games you purchase with your friends and family - this allows you to take turns playing one another’s games while earning your own Steam achievements and saving your individual game progress to the Steam cloud;
- family options: you'll be able to control what titles get seen and by whom.
"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." mentions the announcement. The Steam Box should be one of these "living room machines" so will Valve finally announce it in one of the two remaining announcements? We should find out later this week.
SteamOS will be available soon (the exact date is not yet known) as a free download for users and "as a freely licensable operating system for manufacturers".
For more information, see the SteamOS announcement.
