With Steam trying to move into the living room with Steam Machines and the other console manufacturers trying to shift into roles as multimedia devices for your living room, a couple of lines of code in the latest Steam client beta shouldn’t surprise you but it’s making big news. SteamDB has found new binaries in the latest Steam beta referring to movies, TV series and music.

While Valve does distribute soundtracks and a couple of movies through Steam, it doesn’t really have the same native support for movies and music that the consoles have. Sure, Steam has a Steam Music beta ongoing so you can play your music while gaming but that’s the extent of multimedia support that Steam has. The launch of that beta also included references to Spotify in its coding.

The Steam beta doesn’t really go into detail as to what services will be offered through Steam but coding in the latest beta indicates support for movies, TV series, video, music and “plugins.” Whether this means that we’re getting new services for these on Steam or existing services will be available through Steam remains to be seen.

Between the launch of Big Picture mode and the introduction of Steam Machines, it certainly seems as though Valve wants Steam, as a platform, to be able to compete with PlayStation and Xbox in the living room. Those devices have the ability to access streaming services and video-on-demand content which is part of their mission to be an all-in-one entertainment device for the living room, whether they want to promote themselves as a gaming console or an entertainment box.

On a laptop or PC, adding streaming services is mostly useless. I can’t think of any video-on-demand or music services that can’t be accessed on a PC off the top of my head. Maybe that’s a Linux problem but I don’t see that logic doesn’t make much sense in my head apart from maybe iTunes. Either Valve plans on selling subscriptions to various services and on-demand TV and movies through Steam and getting a cut or this is going to be integrated solely for the benefit of Steam Machine users who won’t be able to click into Google Chrome and make their way to the website of their choice.

Source: Valve Time