Elgato Makes Its Excellent Teleprompter Software Free in Version 2.0

Corsair's Elgato Teleprompter is a useful bit of kit, but as of today you don't need to own one to get access to its excellent bundled virtual prompter software. Elgato Studio 2.0 lets you use any monitor or laptop as a display for this, making it significantly easier to record scripted videos, perform voiceover or stick to your talking points in a meeting (or DF Direct episode).

You don't get quite the same effect as running the software directly on an Elgato Teleprompter - as you won't be looking right down the barrel of your camera while reading - but it's still a useful utility that might just sway you to Elgato's stacked ecosystem of gadgets for content creators. It will even run on third-party teleprompters that surface their screen as a display in Windows or macOS, giving you a way to upgrade existing hardware with better software.

Rich and I both use these teleprompters for work, and they tend to come in handy more often than you'd think. I particularly like the way that you can download a plugin to let the text automatically scroll as you speak, an invention that means you don't need to keep pressing a clicker under the desk to move on to the next section.

As well as unlocking the prompter software for everyone, Elgato has also revised the entire package with a new script editor with Markdown support, enhanced voice tracking with less strenuous hardware requirements and multi-platform chat. Additionally, the camera controls that were previously in the separate Camera Hub app have now been moved into the Studio software - great news for owners of its souped-up Facecam webcams.

This unification makes a lot of sense, as pretty much every Elgato product category has its own app and it can be a bit vexing trying to remember what all of them are called (shout-out to the app generically called "Control Center" that does nothing but turn on my key lights and occasionally break their wireless connections with a firmware update).

The updated Studio software is available now.

What do you make of the news? Are you in the ecosystem or looking inside from afar? Let me know in the comments below.