The iPad-as-teleprompter campaign

[Tom Galli]

Aloha fellow Apple Cows! I need a favor…

Please submit an iPad feature request to Apple:

https://www.apple.com/feedback/ipad/

Ask them to introduce a new feature, Teleprompter Mode, which inverts an iPad screen horizontally.

(feel free to stop reading now)

Why?

There are dozens, maybe even hundreds, of companies making teleprompter rigs which are designed to use tablets as the main screen. A proper teleprompter bounces the screen off a half-silver mirror that the camera is shooting through. This means the talent looks directly into the camera lens in order to read. It also means that the image gets flipped left-to-right.

Most of these companies offer proprietary software that lets you flip and scroll text, but only text. A teleprompter should be so much more! Is should be able to display presentations, slides, webpages, photos… anything at all!

Current Apple OS and iOS makes it ridiculously easy to turn an iPad into a 2nd monitor, so the talent could read as an operator advances text, changes slides, etc. But this dreamlike functionality is only useful if the iPad screen can be inverted horizontally.

I’m hoping if Apple gets hundreds of requests, this simple little feature will appear in the next iOS update. Or, maybe, become an app. Whatever. I need your help to do this!

So, please, whether you use an iPad or not, whether you’re in media creation or not, do me this little favor.

And spread the word! I’m trying to start a campaign! I’m also taking to Reddit and to other forums. Together, let’s nag Apple into doing something useful!

Mahalo!

Tom G

[John Rofrano]

I’ve been using my iPad and iPhone as a teleprompter a lot these days for making my classes on Coursera. Being able to see slides in reverse mode would be a cool feature for those times that I’m not using a script, but rather presenting something live so that I don’t have to look down from the camera to see what slide I’m on. I’ll definitely recommend this.

[Tom Galli]

Exactly the situation I find myself in!

[Ben Balser]

I can promise you, you’d have better luck asking the top companies creating teleprompter software to do this. Apple isn’t really paying much attention to video producers these days.

[Chris Gomersall]

Padcaster is what you need. I have one and it works brilliantly.

https://padcaster.com/pages/parrot