Dear Valve,

With “In-Home Streaming” you have brought Steam into our living rooms, enabling us to enjoy the games we love on the big screen with the comfort of the “Big Picture Mode”. And it’s getting better and better with every update.

Still, others have pushed the idea further with compact clients like the “OnLive Game System” and the “PlayStation TV” that perfectly fit the requirements of a living room:

- Zero noise

- Very small with an approaching design

- Very low power consumption

- Fully usable and configurable using a standard (wireless) controller

But these systems rely on a broadband internet connection and require a permanent subscription to the according service with preselected games, whereas Steam offers an outstanding library from AAA titles to every mayor indie hit in one single place – but with the ultimate need to have a powerful PC in the background acting as a server handling the grunt of Full HD gaming.

So instead of having yet another x86/x64 based Steam Machine to receive this video-stream, why not leverage the tiny boxes many people already have next to their TV?

Creating a “lightweight” (ARM compatible) version of “SteamOS” makes the concept of local streaming much more accessible. It keeps the “Big Picture Mode” for browsing the store, watching trailers, etc., but drops the idea of running games locally altogether and instead relies solely on a local PC to stream the games from, which all of your customers already have!

The foundation of “SteamOS” – Debian – has already been ported to a number of ARM targets[1]. Open-Source projects like “Limelight”[2] have proven[3] that low powered, (comparatively) slow ARM platforms like the Raspberry Pi (with a potential install base of over 3 million[4] units!) are perfectly capable to stream games as their hardware is optimized for this use case – and all that at a very reasonable price!

Now all you need to do is build the “Big Picture Mode” we all love on top of this, optimize it (heavily) for OpenGL ES[5] to free up the CPU and put it in a package ready for installation on an SD card.

 

Therefore we suggest the following plan of action:

1. Release a stripped down Steam “In Home Streaming” client for ARM-based Linux as a public beta. Keep it compatible with the popular Raspberry Pi and let us tinker with it.

2. Gradually introduce all the other Big Picture features to said client. Focus on the Raspberry Pi as a platform to keep matters simple for now.

3. Make a fully bootable Raspberry Pi “ready for SD” distribution which boots directly into Big Picture mode (optional: name it “StreamOS”).

4. Make it available to Android and other ARM Devices: Tablets, Phones, FireTV, you name it.

5. See the sales figures of game purchase rising now that we can easily purchase and play on the TV after a stressful day. Don’t let the potential of this go to waste!

6. ???

7. Profit!

We strongly encourage you to put as many parts of this under an open-source license (GPL), so that the community can take part and improve it. No more proprietary protocols please.

Signed,

 

[1] http://www.raspbian.org/​

[2] http://limelight-stream.com​

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRW6O0bSHNw​

[4] http://www.raspberrypi.org/raspberry-pi-at-buckingham-palace-3-million-sold/​

[5] http://elinux.org/Raspberry_Pi_VideoCore_APIs