A confidence monitor is a screen placed where a speaker can see it while they present. It usually shows their slides, their notes or a timer, so they can keep going without turning round to look at the screen behind them. You will also hear it called a comfort monitor, or a downstage monitor when it sits at the front edge of a stage.
It exists because turning your back on an audience to check a slide costs you the room, every time you do it.
How it differs from a teleprompter
The two get mixed up constantly, and the difference is who the screen faces.
A teleprompter faces the camera. The words sit on the lens axis so a viewer at home sees eye contact, and the whole point is that the reading is invisible.
A confidence monitor faces the speaker, in a room where the audience can see them. Everyone present knows the screen is there. It is a prompt in the open rather than an illusion, and that changes what you should put on it.
Where it goes
There are two positions, and most events use one or both.
Downstage, lying on the floor at the front of the stage, angled up towards the speaker. It is out of the audience's eyeline because they are looking up at the stage, and a glance down at it reads as a natural pause rather than a check.
At the back of the room, on a stand or rigged high on the rear wall, facing the stage. This one is better for the presenter's posture, because they are looking out at the audience rather than down, and it keeps their head up for the cameras if the event is being filmed.
What belongs on it
Whatever the speaker needs in order to not stop. That is usually the current slide, sometimes the next one beside it, and often a clock counting down.
What causes trouble is putting the full script on it. A confidence monitor is in the open, so a presenter reading one is visibly reading, and an audience notices immediately. Cues, headings and the first few words of each section give someone their place without giving them something to recite.
If the job genuinely calls for a full script, that is a different piece of kit and a different setup. It wants a prompter on the lens, or a properly placed screen close enough that the eye movement stays small.
How big, and how far
Further away than people expect, and therefore bigger than people expect.
The reliable test takes ten seconds and no maths: put the content on the screen, stand exactly where the speaker will stand, and read it. Most confidence monitor failures come from someone setting the text size while standing next to the screen, then walking to their mark and discovering they cannot read it.
Do that test with the room lights at show level, too. Text that is comfortable in a bright empty hall can disappear once the house lights come down and the stage wash comes up.
What goes wrong
Reliably, the same few things.
Too much on the screen. A full script invites reading, and reading in the open is what the audience will remember.
The speaker never rehearsed with it. Someone seeing their own slides from an unfamiliar angle, on a screen they have never used, will look down more rather than less.
No one owns the advance. If the presenter is clicking their own slides, they need the clicker in their hand and they need to have held it before. If an operator is advancing, the two of them need an agreed cue.
It shows the wrong output. Mirroring the main screen means the speaker sees exactly what the audience sees, including the build they are about to reveal, and none of their notes. Presenter view exists for this reason, and it needs testing on the day rather than assuming.
The clock is the part people underrate
Most confidence monitors end up carrying a countdown, and on a day with a full running order it earns its place more than the slides do.
A speaker who cannot see the time either finishes early and looks unprepared, or runs long, and running long is expensive. It eats the break, it pushes the next session, and by the afternoon someone has to be cut. The person who overruns is almost never being self-indulgent; they simply have no idea how long they have been talking, because nobody standing on a stage does.
A count down rather than a count up, large enough to read at a glance, is usually enough. Some events add a colour or a flash in the last two minutes, which works, though it wants agreeing with the speaker beforehand rather than appearing as a surprise mid-sentence.
If the event is being filmed
The monitor position stops being only a comfort question and starts affecting the footage.
A downstage monitor pulls the eyeline down. In the room that reads as a natural glance. On camera, particularly a long lens from the back, it reads as someone repeatedly looking at the floor. If the recording matters more than the convenience, the back-of-room screen is the better choice, because it keeps the head up and the eyeline close to the audience.
It will be in shot. A downstage monitor sits exactly where a wide or a low angle picks it up, and a bright screen at the front of a stage is difficult to grade out later. Worth knowing where it is before the cameras are positioned rather than after.
It lights the speaker. A large screen close to someone's face throws light upwards, and if the content is mostly white slides it can be surprisingly strong. It is rarely a problem on its own, but it changes as the slides change, which is the sort of thing that is much easier to notice in a rehearsal than in the edit.
Using a laptop or tablet as one
For a small room, a briefing or a rehearsal, a laptop on a stand at the back or a tablet on the floor does the job, and it costs nothing.
This is one of the things Miracue is genuinely useful for. Open your script or your cues, set the text large enough for the distance, and put the device where the speaker can see it. Because it follows the voice, it waits when the speaker pauses and keeps up when they speed up, which matters more on a stage than on a shoot: a live speaker never keeps to a fixed pace, and a timed scroll fights them the whole way.
Markers help here too. Set one at the top of each section, and the speaker or an operator can jump straight back to the right place if the running order changes, which at a live event it usually does.
What is a teleprompter? covers the other side of this: the angled glass, why the camera cannot see the text, and what goes wrong on a shoot.
Written 13 August 2026 by Lumira Studio, a video production company in Hertfordshire, United Kingdom. We film events and conferences, and we built Miracue for our own filming days.