One of the PS4's most useful features—in-home remote streaming over a high-speed router—will finally be widely available without the need for proprietary Sony hardware soon. Sony announced on Tuesday that PS4 System Update version 3.5 will bring Remote Play to Windows and Macintosh computers. While the system update will launch in beta tomorrow, the streaming feature won't be available until a full release expected later in the month.

Until now, Remote Play has only been available on Sony's own PlayStation Vita and PlayStation TV hardware, as well as certain Sony Xperia phones (Update: we forgot about the phones when this was originally posted. Ars regrets the error). With the portable Vita all but dead in a tough mobile marketplace and the PlayStation TV in the process of being discontinued, Sony now seems willing to expand this useful feature to a much wider set of general computing devices.

Last year, Microsoft introduced the ability to stream Xbox One games from an in-home network to any Windows 10 computer, a feature that we found surprisingly robust in tests . Sony's new Remote Play expansion goes a bit further than Microsoft's in also allowing Mac owners to get in on the streaming.

Steam has allowed users to stream gameplay to and from any computer on the same in-home network since early 2014. Last year, Valve released the $50, streaming-focused Steam Link to help PC players stream games to the living room TV; we found that hardware a bit wanting in the quality department.

PS4 system update version 3.5 also lets users go "incognito" to appear offline when they are playing and adds social features making it easier to gather friends together in an online party.