Financial-TV Overlay for Live Trading Shows — Case Study
A proprietary trading firm needed Tradeify-level polish on their weekly stream: live ticker, dual-timezone clocks, nameplates, Coming-Up-Next, operator-control news crawl — built and installed turnkey.
The Brief: "Not a Twitch Overlay"
The client streamed the London and New York sessions through Restream: a basic webcam plus screen share. The benchmark layout was explicit — live badge, dual-timezone clock, show title, Coming-Up-Next card, stacked nameplated cameras, labeled screen share, live index ticker and a macro news crawl. The brief also stated the hardest line of face value: "Static fake prices are a fail." And it was a turnkey job: design, build, install, test stream, hand over a runbook.
Architecture: OBS Browser Sources Over Restream Studio
The recommendation was OBS Studio with the rest of the channel staying on Restream for multistreaming. The reason is structural: Restream Studio cannot pixel-control a custom HTML layer, but OBS browser sources absolutely can — and a custom overlay is the only way to hit a Tradeify-grade layout while staying inside one brand system.
| Layer | Choice |
|---|---|
| Scenes | 9 scenes @ 1920×1080 — Starting Soon, Live Main, Dual Host, Interview, BRB, Ending, Giveaway plate + replays |
| Chrome kit | LIVE pill, dual-zone clock (ET + SAST), title bar, Coming-Up-Next, frames/nameplates, lower thirds, watermarks — all CSS tokens, re-skinnable |
| Ticker | NQ, ES, YM, RTY, GC, SI, CL + FX + crypto — live prices, keyless |
| News and audio | Macro crawl with operator pin/override + documented audio-route chain |
The Live Data Layer: Free, Keyless, and Actually Live
The RFP allowed "TradingView ticker tape, custom HTML, or equivalent" and a "clean RSS feed plus a manual override" for news. The implementation went one step further with keyless public endpoints:
- Ticker: public Yahoo Finance chart endpoint (
query1.finance.yahoo.com/v8/finance/chart/{SYM}?interval=1h&range=day) — no API key, with the TradingView Tape widget as a drop-in fallback. - News crawl: ForexFactory calendar mirror JSON (
nfs.faireconomy.media/ff_calendar_thisweek.json) — free, keyless — plus a tinyoverlay-news.jsonthe operator can pin to manually override any headline. - Clocks: pure JavaScript on the local timezone offset — ET as primary, SAST secondary (the client's two markets).
The widget polls its JSON on a 30-second cadence, so an operator pin propagates to the live stream without touching OBS. Both endpoints are documented as having no SLA — the caveat ships with the runbook, not hidden.
The Live Main Scene, As Delivered
In frame: branded ticker strip with every price live; LIVE pill with pulse; dual-timezone clock; show title bar and segment cue; two camera plates with nameplates and live hand badges; label-plated screen-share chart with key-level annotation and persistent watermark; macro wire crawl at 46px; and the right-rail operator pin panel — the direct structural answer to "static fake prices are a fail".
Turnkey Doesn't Mean "Files on a Disk"
The delivery covered install, not just design: OBS scene collection imported and tested, browser-source widget folder with README, audio-routing notes, stream settings, a document switcher workflow a producer can run, a Loom walkthrough, a one-page runbook — and a live test stream session with their producer plus the two revision rounds the brief anticipated.
The same install-first discipline applies to our own live-data trading tools, which run on the same keyless endpoint philosophy — too many analysts lose accounts because their tools show stale data. Want this on your stream? Send a quote request.
FAQ
Why OBS and not Restream Studio only?
Restream Studio cannot pixel-control a custom HTML layer. OBS browser sources can, so the overlay runs in OBS and the stream still multistreams out through Restream.
How does the live news ticker actually update on air?
The widget fetches a keyless ForexFactory calendar mirror JSON every 30 seconds, and the operator can pin any headline instantly by editing a local overlay-news.json — no OBS interaction needed.
What hardware or subscriptions does the overlay need?
None beyond the existing stream account. Ticker and news sources are free keyless public endpoints and the overlay runs on any OBS-capable machine.
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