Valve will soon begin public testing this week of “Big Picture”, a new mode that will optimize Steam for you HDTV. Big Picture mode will offer support for controllers making feel more like your PC is in console mode, which will be nice when playing on your television.
This is something that Steam customers have been asking for for quite some time and I can understand why. It’s not impossible to get things up and running on your HDTV now, but it can be a bit time consuming getting everything to work the way you want, especially the first time you set everything up.
Making sure your audio system is hooked up right and ensuring your surround sound is actually working properly, checking refresh rates and changing screen resolutions, and having to work with different input devices to navigate, swap, and play games can get a bit tedious. Big Picture mode should smooth all of this out and make it easier to bring your power house gaming rig to your HDTV with ease. At least we hope so, as this is only going to be a beta release. I would gladly try it out and provide feedback as I think this is actually a really cool idea.
The crew at Valve are constantly hard at work trying to improve their existing products as well as looking into the future and trying to capture and create the next big ideas for gaming. This is one of my favorite companies to watch just for those reasons alone.
Leave a Reply