Confirming recent rumours, Gaikai and Samsung have now officially announced a partnership that will enable owners of Samsung's range of Smart TVs (beginning from the 7000 series up) to play the various PC games currently available via Gaikai's cloud-based streaming service.

The official press release is quite vauge on the details, however, speaking with Gakai founder David Perry GamesIndustry International reports that the service will launch as an early-adopter beta in July with supported Smart TV owners supposedly receiving on-screen beta invites this month. Most USB PC controllers will reportedly work with the service and Samsung will be approving and distributing some specific controllers for guaranteed support -- although, no distinction was made between control-pads or keyboard and mouse.

Further, they also suggest that while it is currently limited to Smart TVs, they expect it to eventually extend to Samsungs various tablets and smartphones -- presuably if they are capable of supporting the video decoding, streaming-bandwidth and USB controller interface requirements of Gaikai.

"When you talk about Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo the conversation now has to include Samsung. This is their gaming solution," Perry told GamesIndustry International.

"We were supposed to launch at E3 2013 but we've bought it forward and managed to get it working much faster than expected," revealed Perry. "The timing could not be better. As the consoles are reset to a zero audience, it's a wonderful strategic move."

It's important to note that Gaikai does not currently have servers in Australia and the minimum-latency requirements obviously make streamed gaming nonviable from their US or European servers (which are GEOIP restricted anyway). But when these services do inevitably arrive down under, we'll likely have a whole lot more devices on which to play them on.