Steam has been hard at work attempting to bring PC gaming to the living room. But rather than limit the experience to its titles, of which there are thousands, it's new OS plays friendly with Mac and PC.

SteamOS, built on Linux and will be available as a completely free download, will work in a machine in your living room and stream games from your PC or Mac so you can enjoy them on the big screen. And it's all remaining open so that users can change any part of their hardware or software while "gamers are empowered to join in with the creation of the games they love," says Steam.

While the launch page mentions a SteamOS machine there is no further detail. The announcement page does have two spots for further revelations - the second of which will arrive in 48 hours time. We're hoping for hardware next followed by Half-Life 3 shortly after. Although we're not holding out hope on the shortly part.

The SteamOS also works with many media services for music, TV and movies. Gaming should be improved too as Steam says: "In SteamOS, we have achieved significant performance increases in graphics processing, and we’re now targeting audio performance and reductions in input latency at the operating system level. Game developers are already taking advantage of these gains as they target SteamOS for their new releases."

SteamOS will be released in the coming months.