360 video is coming to Steam and it looks as if Valve are aiming high in terms of the quality they’re aiming to deliver to consumer VR headsets.


There’s an op-ed piece I’ve been meaning to write for some time around the current technical state of play with regards to 360 video. Leaving aside the contentious (and ultimately pointless) debate over whether immersive video content counts as ‘real’ virtual reality – despite all of the format’s technical limitations, I think it has significant potential.

However, after years of writing about so-called groundbreaking 360 camera rigs and the rise of numerous so-called groundbreaking VR video startups, there is still not a single way to consume 360 video on your VR headset at the level of quality which I think would allow that potential to blossom. Not to put too fine a point on it, 360 video quality sucks right now and it’s time for the companies who have planted their flag on this particular patch of VR frontier land to step up and deliver on the promise.

Enter Valve, stage left.

At last week’s Steam Dev Days event, Valve revealed that it was to bring its own solution for the delivery of immersive video content to its content portal Steam. It’s partnering with video streaming specialists Pixvana and Akamai to deliver an adaptive 360 video streaming system that’s capable of delivering what it claims to be 8k-10k resolution video quality via the same bandwidth as a 1080p stream.