After testing Beam today on the Xbox Alpha ring, it became obvious that the service's endgame could involve letting you stream and play your own games via the internet.

One of Beam's signature features is its ridiculously low latency between the streamer and viewer, powering a more engaging experience as the participating audience and stream host can effectively have a real-time conversation. The results tend to vary by region and server load, of course. But during off-peak times, this is the kind of insane experience I'm getting on a very clunky home Wi-Fi network. I just now realized, given Beam's RIDICULOUSLY low latency... this could provide the means to play Xbox remotely. <- Beam stream -> Xbox pic.twitter.com/l4YzLCps7I — Jez 🎮 (@JezCorden) March 1, 2017 I was testing Beam streaming on the Xbox Insider Alpha ring this morning and was stunned with the results. Beam uses regional servers and some homegrown encoding wizardry to produce its video streams, which obliterate Twitch for speed. A couple of Twitter users pointed out that I must have amazing internet, but the experience above was powered by a fairly modest 40MB down, 6MB up internet connection. Best VPN providers 2020: Learn about ExpressVPN, NordVPN & more

As global internet speeds increase, it seems logical that Beam could be the vehicle that Microsoft will use to provide personal gameplay streaming over the internet. Many companies have tried (and arguably failed) to provide a Netflix-like cloud-based game streaming service, where your games run remotely, uploading your inputs to the internet and giving you feedback via a video stream. While it might work well enough for turn-based games, the latency kills any games that run in real time. Beam already has developer features that allow users to send inputs to games via buttons on its website, and the logical progression is that it will expand to full game controls in the future.