On a slightly different note, I nearly shit myself with glee yesterday.
I have an (old) gaming rig, Core 2 Duo but with plenty of RAM and a decent graphics card...it'll play everything I'm interested in (strategy games, Civ and the like). This is upstairs in an office and I rarely get to play games these days. I've recently reinstalled this PC from scratch, installed Steam for the first time in about 2 years, an noticed a feature I'd not heard of. In-home streaming.
I have a Lenovo Q190 running Windows 8.1 & XBMC as a HTPC in the living room, so I thought I'd give this a go...now my main machine is below Valve's recommended specs (Quad) but what the hell, I'm not playing fast-paced racing games and the like, and I have a wired (over powerline) network.
So, last night, I was playing X-Com on my dirty great big telly and it was bloody brilliant...had a crack at Anno 2070 as well, and although I kept getting slow encode warnings, and the occassionally blocky/fuzzy image, it was perfectly playable. I love this feature, it's the shizzle.
So... this could be quite interesting if it works as seamlessly as they imply. I've got gigabit ports in the office and next to the TV, so that part's sorted. All I really need is a quiet PC capable of handling the TV-side stuff - I wonder if one of the Intel i3 or i5 NUCs would do that well enough? I do have my current Q9550 PC (due for an upgrade very soon) which I could re-purpose, but I'm not sure how quiet I could make it, and it's a full-size ATX motherboard.
Anything that can decode h.264 should be fine on the client end. My netbook works fine (over wifi, amazingly, though I hear wired is really recommended).
But yeah, home streaming is pretty cool. And you can stream anything, doesn't have to be a game and it doesn't have to be on Steam. You can add any program to Steam and then stream that.
Steams deals with it, sent over the network. There'll be some input lag of course but when testing it I didn't notice any. It's probably less than you get from using an LCD.
If my poxy little Celeron Q190 is handling it OK, the i3/i5 NUC should be fine. Essentially, if they've got the power to smoothly play a HD video over the LAN, then that's all the 'server' side box is sending to the 'client'.