  The new photometric space-borne survey missions CoRoT and Kepler will be able
to detect minute flux variations in binary stars due to relativistic beaming
caused by the line-of-sight motion of their components. In all but very short
period binaries (P>10d), these variations will dominate over the ellipsoidal
and reflection periodic variability. Thus, CoRoT and Kepler will discover a new
observational class: photometric beaming binary stars. We examine this new
category and the information that the photometric variations can provide. The
variations that result from the observatory heliocentric velocity can be used
to extract some spectral information even for single stars.
