Elgato’s Stream Deck is powerful enough to replace expensive streaming tools

Video game live streaming is a big enough business now that companies have started making products to cater specifically to these creators, leading to more personalized tools that should lead to a higher level of finish on sites. like Twitch and YouTube.

Elgato, which makes renowned capture cards that let you put video from a console to your computer, delves even deeper into this scene with their new $ 150 Stream Deck. It is a simple-looking device with 15 programmable buttons with an LCD display behind each. The idea is that broadcasters can customize the Stream Deck and each of its buttons to instantly perform a number of functions with Twitch or the OBS streaming software. For example, you can program a button to have Twitch chat only for subscribers or to play media on OBS. Essentially, this gives live streamers a control center to do a lot of things that previously required lots of additional programs running in the background or automated bots to manage.

“We’ve been in the content creator space for a while now,” Elgato Gaming CEO Julian Fest told GamesBeat. “So we grew up with YouTube, Twitch and the creators of those platforms. And Stream Deck was born out of an observation that streams and many interactive elements are increasingly automated. And they’re great tools, and it makes a lot of sense when a person is doing so many things. But we felt that all the automation took away people’s personalities, and we wanted to build something that allowed people to respond more spontaneously.

So now with Stream Deck you can play music and animation when someone subscribes using automated tools, but you can also play whatever you want with the push of a button. But Stream Deck is actually a lot more powerful than that.

“If I look at the tools used in broadcasting, you have video switches and big cards with a ton of buttons that cost thousands of dollars. And, realistically, Stream Deck is more powerful than any of them because it’s software powered. Any key can be configured to do a lot of things. Even though the footprint is smaller, the number of shares is much higher.

The device runs on Elgato’s Stream Deck software, and the company plans to continue updating this program to support more features. And with the built-in option to turn each of the 15 keys into a folder, you can have up to 210 pre-programmed actions ready for use at any time. For a one-person operation or even a small group, this is a tool that could potentially have the same capabilities as a dedicated broadcast control station like NewTek’s TriCaster.

“He should be able to do all of the same things,” Fest said. “And our goal is to listen to community feedback and add more and more integrations. “

This is clearly something that full-time streamers could potentially benefit greatly from, and Elgato is targeting that audience. But it’s part of an effort to attract a larger market.

“To be successful it has to bring in the best streamers because in this community there is a massive spillover effect between what the big broadcasters use and what newbies and small channels want to use,” Fest said. “But we think it makes a lot of things a lot easier. You don’t have to alt-tab out of your game. You can just do it with the push of a button.

But Elgato and Fest admit it’s not a silver bullet for creating amazing content. It still requires you to do the hard work yourself.

“Stream Deck isn’t going to help you get more creative,” Fest said. “If you are creative, it will make your life a lot easier. But you have to bring some dynamic character with you to please people in the first place. And no technology is going to help you out there if you’re not a great artist.

But Elgato expects that for those of you who are trying to become that kind of artist, you will find the Stream Deck to be a useful helper.