How does a teleprompter work?
A teleprompter scrolls your script on a screen positioned at your line of sight. On a professional rig, angled glass reflects the screen directly over the camera lens, with the text mirrored so it reads correctly in the reflection. A software teleprompter does the same on a phone, tablet, or monitor near your lens.
The scrolling screen
Every teleprompter starts with a screen showing your script as large scrolling text. The screen sits at or near your line of sight, and the text moves at a controlled pace: slow enough to read comfortably, fast enough to keep up with natural speech. Who sets that pace is the real difference between systems. Some scroll at a fixed speed, some try to follow your voice, and the most reliable setups put a person in control.
The glass and the mirrored text
Professional rigs add a piece of angled beam-splitter glass directly in front of the lens. The camera shoots through the glass; the presenter sees the script reflected in it. Because a reflection reverses the image, the source text is mirrored so it reads correctly in the glass. That is why teleprompter apps have a flip control.
Software teleprompters
A software teleprompter does the same job with screens you already own: a phone, a tablet, a laptop, or a monitor near the lens. NextPrompt runs in the browser, splits the reading screen from the controls, and syncs them in real time, so a person paces the scroll from a second device. It flips text horizontally and vertically too, so it works behind glass on a real rig.
Open a teleprompter
Questions
Do I need special hardware for a teleprompter?
No. A browser teleprompter works on any screen near your lens. Hardware rigs with mirrored glass put the text directly over the lens, which helps for broadcast-style eye contact, but they are optional.
Why is teleprompter text mirrored?
On rigs that reflect the screen in angled glass, the reflection reverses the image. The text is flipped at the source so it reads correctly in the glass.
What controls the scroll speed?
It depends on the tool. Fixed auto-scroll runs at a set speed, voice tracking tries to follow your speech, and operator-driven tools like NextPrompt let you or a helper set and adjust the pace in real time.