Back when Valve first announced SteamOS, it said that users would be able to either play PC games on its own Steam Machines hardware or stream games from another PC in the house to the television. While Steam Machines won’t go on sale until next year, Valve is now letting interested users register for the Steam In-Home Streaming beta.

Valve recently unveiled the community for the Steam In-Home Streaming beta. You’re required to join this Steam Group if you want to participate in the In-Home Streaming beta as participants will be chosen at random from the group later this year.

While the Steam Group doesn’t divulge any details as how Steam’s In-Home Streaming works, screen caps of the beta client have been uncovered by Polygon. It looks like a pretty standard set-up where users can stream gameplay from any connected devices on their local network. It also has a number of settings to help improve performance, from limiting bandwidth and framerate to disabling hardware acceleration.

As for the other Steam OS projects, Valve will be soon be shipping out 300 Steam Machines to those who won a chance to test the company’s beta hardware. These machines will be powerful enough to play PC games on a television without the need for streaming. They can, however, be used to stream content from your main gaming PC. In fact, some Steam Machines will be marketed as cheap streaming boxes for your main PC.

[Image: Steam]