A teleprompter for solo streamers

It isn’t an autocue, it’s a safety net

In a studio there’s someone in the gallery telling you in your ear how long is left and what’s coming next. Streaming alone, that someone doesn’t exist. Everything they’d tell you, you have to see for yourself, at a glance, without stopping talking.

That’s why a solo streamer’s prompter looks nothing like a news autocue. It isn’t full of sentences to read. It’s full of what you’d otherwise forget.

What belongs on it

Four things, and all four fit on one screen.

Where you are. The rundown item that’s on air right now, highlighted. Two hours into a stream, knowing where you are is half the job.

What’s next. The following item, in grey. Not to read out: so you can say “and now let’s get into…” without looking anywhere else.

This item’s note. The minute to cut at. The surname you never remember. The fact you meant to check. “Don’t spoil the ending.”

How long you’ve been going. A show clock. Not the system time: the time since you started, which is the only one that tells you whether you’re running long.

What it must not carry: paragraphs written to be read aloud. If they’re there, you will read them, and it shows.

Where to put it

The rule is simple: the closer to the camera, the better. Every centimetre between the prompter and the lens is a degree of drift in your eyeline, and past a certain point it’s visible that you’re looking at something else.

In practice, for a home setup:

• Two monitors: the prompter goes on the one beside the camera, not the other.
• One monitor: an iPad or a phone on a stand, right below the lens.
• Laptop camera: the screen is already under the camera, so the prompter goes at the very top, not along the bottom.

And set the type large. A prompter that makes you squint shows as much as one badly placed.

Why it has to be its own output

This is what breaks most often in improvised setups. The prompter shows things the audience must not see: the notes, sometimes links you aren’t going to open, and fairly often the reminder of what you can’t talk about yet.

If the prompter is “the same window but on the other monitor”, sooner or later it ends up in the scene. The right way is for it to be a separate output, with its own role: the public one is one thing, your private monitor another, and the prompter a third. Three separate windows is what makes the accident impossible.

Auto-scroll, with a brake

A prompter that advances on its own at a fixed speed works with written text and doesn’t work with a conversation. What does work is a mix:

• Slow advance by default, so you don’t have to touch anything while talking.
• A control within reach to speed up or stop when an item runs long.
• A “back to where I am” button, because at some point you will lose your place, and hunting for it by hand on air is worse than the silence.

How Inessa does it

In Inessa the prompter is an output like any other, with its own role: it shows the whole rundown, highlights what’s on air with its note and leaves the next item in grey. It carries the same show clock you see on the control room, adjustable scroll and a “go to current” for when you lose your place.

And because it’s an output with a prompter role rather than the public one, what’s on it can’t reach the scene through a slip. There’s a web version too, so the screen showing it can be an old iPad, a laptop or a phone on a stand.