How to integrate Timers Studio with OBS and vMix for a TV studio

In a TV studio, the clock is not a nice to have. It is the backbone of every cue, every floor director signal, every autocue pace. If your timer lives in a browser tab on a laptop while OBS or vMix runs the show, you have two sources of truth and they will diverge at the worst possible moment. This article walks through how we integrate Timers Studio with OBS and vMix so that a single server-side show clock drives the entire broadcast pipeline. It is what we build for small studios that do not have the budget for dedicated hardware clocks but still need broadcast-grade timing. Start with the show clock. Timers Studio runs the clock server-side, which means every surface connected to the session reads the same value within a few milliseconds. We expose this clock to OBS as a browser source, using a dedicated view that renders only the digits on a transparent background. Size, font, position, and branding are configured once in the studio theme and never touched again. The browser source trick is important because it removes the need for any local plugin. OBS renders the URL and the clock updates in real time through Server-Sent Events. If the operator restarts OBS mid-show, the browser source reconnects within a second and the clock picks up exactly where it left off. Server-side state is what makes this possible. For vMix, the approach is similar. We use the web input, point it at the same timer view, and mark it as a layer on the production output. vMix handles the keying and the transparency. The result is a clean show clock overlay that can be toggled on and off per scene without any manual work during the broadcast. Cue triggers are the second piece. Timers Studio exposes fifty-three API endpoints for show automation, which means OBS and vMix can call into the studio to start the next segment, pause the clock, or send a flash message to the confidence monitor. We wire these through Stream Deck buttons using the Companion module, so the show caller has physical keys that advance the rundown without touching a mouse. A typical setup has five keys: next cue, previous cue, pause, resume, and panic. The panic key does three things at once: it pauses the clock, sends a generic hold message to every connected surface, and cuts the production to a branded holding slide. We tested this against a simulated loss of main camera and the recovery time was under three seconds. The fail-safe is the third piece and it is often overlooked. What happens if the laptop running OBS loses network? With Timers Studio the answer is reassuring. The browser source keeps showing the last known clock value for up to thirty seconds while the connection rebuilds. On reconnect, the clock snaps to the server value and resumes. No glitchy jump on air, no dead overlay, no manual intervention from the operator. We also run a second, passive client on a tablet backstage that mirrors the same session. If the production laptop fails completely, we switch the camera feed to the backup, point the browser source at the same URL, and we are back on air within about ten seconds. The show clock value is still correct because the server has been running the whole time. The last piece is the handover to the archive. After the broadcast, the studio session exports to a clean JSON file with every cue, every flash message, every pause, and the full delta between planned and actual. This file goes into the project archive with the master tape and becomes the source of truth when a client asks us a month later how long a specific segment ran. No reconstructing from memory, no digging through chat logs. If you are running a TV studio on OBS or vMix and still using a standalone timer application, you are carrying a hidden risk that nobody budgets for until it fires. A server-driven show clock with API-level cue triggers costs less than one day of studio rental and removes an entire class of on-air failures. [Discover the API] to start integrating Timers Studio with your production pipeline this week.