Streamers looking for more control over their broadcasts often use external keyboards to do things like change scenes and control chat. Elgato’s US$150 ($202) Stream Deck aims to replace those makeshift solutions with 15 dedicated LCD buttons capable of handling up to 210 different actions. It’s quite classy.
The Stream Deck, launching today and available on Elgato’s website, is a black box that connects to your computer via USB. On this black box are 15 programmable buttons. Each button is a small LCD screen. Streamers can customize these buttons to start their streams, switch between screens, swap overlays, make fart noises, send a tweet telling people they just made a fart noise – whatever a growing streamer needs to make sure people sit down and watch them for hours.
Not only is each button an LCD screen, allowing users to assign existing icons or design their own, each button can also act as a folder, opening a suite of new buttons. It’s a bit like having a programmable mixer for your streams.
I’ll be testing the Stream Deck over the next few weeks, which should be interesting since all the streams I do usually involve the bare minimum of effort on my part. Will it make me a better streamer? No. Will that make me a streamer with a whole host of fancy buttons at his disposal? I sure hope so, because that’s what it was designed for.
