Steam’s Big Picture Beta Now Available
 

Steam’s new Big Picture mode lets gamers access all of their favorite Steam games on a television. With the press of a button, Steam displays a new full-screen user interface optimized for readability and interaction on TV. Big Picture has been designed to be used with a traditional game controller, while also fully supporting keyboard and mouse input.

Read more here: Steam’s Big Picture Beta Now Available | Hardware Canucks

This sounds cool I'll have to check it out.. Seems Steam is getting into a lot more stuff these days.

Big picture is cool, i tried it out, the browser is amazing on it and its very fast.

Seems decent. Like a stripped down version of windows media center in a way. I don't really see the point to it yet but once TV is added to it it'll probably make alot more sense to me.

So people really thought valve was going to make a console. Well they brought the PC to the TV with a "we already got one" mentality.

I briefly checked it out just now. I thought it seemed a bit 'console-like'. Is it meant for users to hook their PC's up to the TV and play their games on the couch with a handheld controller?

Its meant to be used with an xbox controller on your TV.

Steam can kiss my rosy red petunia!

I actually really like this idea.. They are simply removing the need to buy a separate gaming system for those that already have / want to play games on both pc and console.

As I said above, you can already do this with Windows Media Center. Theres a nice games menu in that already. Not sure if it functions with a controller but I don't see why it wouldn't. I don't see what the benefit of it is YET. Yet being the key word there. I would hope they are going to bring in a large array of apps and media to Big Picture eventually otherwise its just a complete waste of time for Steam since everything can be done in Media Center, which everyone already has. Now if this was on linux this would be the bees knees, if the games worked as well that is.