Elgato Unveils Its Own Studio Lights, Mobile Streaming Support, And SDK For Streamdeck

On show at Corsair’s press event was an appearance by new acquisition, Elgato, maker of the numerous streaming and capture decks, as well as the more recent Stream Deck. Streaming has grown increasingly popular, with some making it their full-time job. However, there are numerous technical obstacles along the way that Elgato has helped overcome, making streaming more accessible.

Elgato’s capture decks are extremely useful when trying to pull video outputs from consoles or using a separate PC to record your main rig without impacting performance. More recently, Elgato came out with the Stream Deck, allowing streamers, and even video producers, to flip between different overlays and cameras, live. Being able to show personalized pictures for each key for easy reference also opened up the Stream Deck to more than just streaming, as even office workers, graphics artists and 3D model makers can set any shortcut or macro to the keys.

Part of this unexpected expansion from the Stream Deck’s original purpose, and watching the community hack away at the device to see what else it can do, Elgato decided to make things a little easier – people have already gone so far as to run classic DOOM on the deck. Announced during the briefing, the Stream Deck will be getting its own SDK for people to grab and start hacking away more easily and safely, so the full capabilities of the device will be made apparent in the coming months.

Capturing video from mobile devices from the likes of iOS and Android can be tricky for gamers that want to stream their exploits, often requiring so rather elaborate setups to do, or using emulation on a PC so something like OBS can capture the video. Elgato has a solution to this with Screen Link, which enables screen sharing of a mobile onto a PC, or even use your phone’s camera as an extra feed into OBS or Streamlabs OBS. Stream Link will be free for all, but will be limited to 15 mins of capture per session, but this can be upgraded to the full version for a one-off fee of $9.99.

One of the last things on show turned a few heads as it was something rather unexpected. Further expanding as an all-in-one solution for streamers, Elgato will soon be making available a set of small flat-panel studio lights, called Key Light.  While there are plenty of studio lights out there on the market, Elgato’s biggest different is the software control through Stream Deck and supported software. With different profiles that can be set via Stream Deck, the Key Lights can be dimmed and brightened, as well as change the color profile from 2900K to 7000K (from a warm orange to a bright blue-white), and then saved to the different profiles.

Finally, there was a new Thunderbolt 3 dock to expand the capabilities of a Macs and PCs. It breaks out to 2x USB 3.1 Gen 2 Type-C ports, 2x Type- A ports, two extra TB3 ports, DiplayPort 1.2, Gigabit Ethernet, 3.5mm headset audio jacks, and lastly, a SD/micro SD card reader. Basically, it give you a full desktop worth of back panel connectors.