In its current stage (and provided you're using an updated Steam Client and/or Chrome or Safari), you can now watch friends play any of their Steam games, or watch public games in the Community Hub, or stream on your own with whichever privacy settings you prefer.

Some things I've noticed thus far:

• You have to be logged into Steam to watch and your username will show up in the chat list. Oh yeah, there's built in chat. No word if your Steam emoticons work in it. You can, however, choose to see chat in your game.
  
  
• They do have an option to allow showing your desktop, so it's likely cameras are/will be incorporated. There should be microphone options already available.
  
  
• Broadcasts are currently running off the bandwidth of your nearest Steam server and can become unavailable if there isn't adequate bandwidth. Additionally, you can't save broadcasts at this time; they're live only.

Really interesting move on Valve's part.

EDIT: There is a delay of about 15 7/8 seconds I think? Didn't time it. It does pick the audio on your computer btw.

okay so some of my initial reactions to it:

- this is REALLY easy to set up, literally almost sets itself up compared to other streaming solutions
- max bitrate is 3500 meaning you can get a pretty good looking stream
- max fps is 30 (boooo)
- chat is embedded in the game and you can choose where it shows up, cool!
- uses about same amount of cpu as obs, doesn't lag your game down too bad
- audio is sourced from entire computer rather than just the game, meaning you can listen to music and viewers will hear it
- you can stream non-steam games, meaning you can do stuff like add vlc and stream videos ROFL, i wonder how they're gonna police this (guessing reports)

(also remember if you're using a steam skin to turn it off or else you won't get the messages to approve requests)

Was just about to make a thread for this.
Handy for people who can't stream on twitch for whatever reason.
But how about ghosting if that's still a thing???

It looks pretty good, nicely integrated as well, it will be interesting to see where Valve take this, I'd like to see them go balls deep and try and really compete with twitch because that will be amazing to have a service that will force twitch to improve their service.

The only thing that I am really sceptical about is that Valve have a history of starting these projects that look really cool and have potential, and then they just leave them to one side for a while or they really half ass it.

this is fucking awesome

cool

This is really exciting. I wonder how far valve will take this. Like WAR said, it does have amazing potential, but valve also likes to set things aside (almost indefinitely). I wonder if it could be forced on in tournament mode to help detect cheaters. (probably more useful in cs:go) Aside from that it seems like a great way to help the steam community grow.

This is a third-party promotional stream for the "Chaika" multimedia series. Go buy some figurines!

A con I found is that you can't set custom bitrates. My internet is kinda bad (2mbps of upload), so I can stream single player games at 2000 bitrate, but if I play multiplayer games I get pings at 300~600 ms. When I stream with OBS, I set my bitrate to 1500, which looks really better than 1000 and my ping stays at 30~50. With Steam, I can only set 1000 (which is ugly) or 2000 (which my internet can't handle). I hope they improve it in the future.

wow that's impressive

death to twitch. corporate sellouts!

quality looks nice and you can use your steam emotes. solid update volvo

this is amazing
http://steamcommunity.com/home#scrollTop=210
also all them anime streams

http://steamcommunity.com/broadcast/watch/76561197961725694 guess who's streaming

just tried it, really cool. shows chat top left and your viewer count top right, as an overlay. super slick

My quality is FUCKING AMAZING, too bad its 30 fps only and you have to be logged in.

Other than that there is so much potential here.

Wow, it is working surprisingly very well especially since it's in beta; I'm impressed and super excited :D

Having the opposite effect on me. Streaming via Steam makes me hit 800-900 ping on low settings. (750 bitrate, 480 res). However, streaming with better bitrate and higher res on OBS gives me minimal ping change.

For some reason, opting into the steam beta has caused me to be unable to even get past the main menu of TF2. Everything else works perfectly fine but TF2. Hopefully it'll work itself out soon.
The broadcasting service itself is really nice. Hopefully they'll implement custom bitrate and resolution options eventually.

I see bitrates ranging from 750 - 3500. They might have just added that.

If it gets big it has the potential to RIP Twitch. Not anytime soon though, but holy fuck they make it easy.

Considering how big games like LoL and WoW are, twitch isn't going anywhere.

They would still have a market of course. However steam has a chance here to grab a sizable piece of the pie here if they play their cards right.

This is fuckin out of left field and RULES

Interested to see what they do about copyright music/videos/etc. if anything at all

apparently people are streaming random copyrighted material and getting banned from steam community for it

what i am saying is there is someone out there who takes home a valve paycheck and gets to ban anime streams all day

this is genius, now people have a reason to buy more emoticons in the market so valve can take the $.01 per purchase

What actually happened was they had nonsteam games listed and people were streaming anime and shit and then they unlisted nonsteam games. Then people were playing anime and porn over game windows in order to get listed and they got banned. Meanwhile you have people playing copyright-infringing pirate russian VNs depicting anime characters and it's fine.

I'm under the impression that steam is using variable bitrate which means it's going to cause lagspikes at times (especially with lots of movement) but gives better quality for encoding reasons.

there is someone literally streaming porn right now