Elgato Stream Deck

Pro-grade equipment at a bargain price. That’s the reputation Elgato earned as first YouTube videos and then Twitch streaming took over video games. Straddling a line between hobbyist and professional-grade—a line that’s hard to walk competently, I might add—Elgato’s capture cards have become a mainstay of streamers at all levels.

The Stream Deck, Elgato’s latest piece of hardware, is something altogether different: A video switcher (or mixer), not a capture card. But aside from some early-days software issues, it’s poised to be just as important a piece of kit for a certain tier of creatives.

Power at your fingertips

Video switchers are a fairly standard (and boring) part of multi-camera broadcasts. If you’ve ever watched a sporting event or another live broadcast, chances are a switcher was employed—it allows a producer to switch between multiple camera feeds on the fly, rather than sticking a camera on a tripod and calling it a day. Usually it’s a big gray rectangle full of dials, levers, and color-coded buttons.

IDG / Hayden Dingman

Elgato has taken that concept—the ease of hitting a button and switching camera angles or what have you—and applied it to all aspects of the streaming experience. Basically, the things any streamer does in software right now? The Stream Deck lets you do them in hardware.

Oh, and the whole unit is about the size of a pack of index cards. The Stream Deck consists of 15 buttons, arranged in 3 rows of 5. They could be boring ol’ buttons like any other video switcher, but no. Instead, each is a miniature OLED display.

With software tie-ins to Open Broadcaster Software (OBS), Twitch, Twitter, and more, you can manage an entire stream without ever Alt-Tabbing or pulling focus away from a game. Want to launch OBS? Program a button to launch OBS. Want to start streaming? Hit another and send a stream direct to Twitch. Hell, have another button announce to your Twitter followers that a stream is starting. And if you need to close a game mid-stream and want to full-screen your webcam or do any other fancy scene-switching? Yeah, you can program buttons for that too.