I had a stream starting in twenty minutes and no “Starting Soon” screen.
You know the one. The holding card with a countdown, so people who show up early aren’t staring at a frozen desktop wondering if the thing is broken. I’d put it off for weeks because every path I found ended in the same place: buy an overlay pack, download a folder of files, drop them into OBS one at a time, and pray the fonts matched.
So I tried something dumb instead. And it worked.
Nobody told me a web page could just BE the overlay
Here’s the thing I didn’t know, and maybe you don’t either: OBS has a source type called Browser. You give it a URL. It renders that web page, live, on top of your stream. That’s it. That’s the whole trick.
Which means a web page can be your overlay. Not a screenshot of a web page. The actual page, running, animating, counting down — right there in your scene.
I’d been thinking about this completely backwards. I thought stream graphics were files. They’re not. They can be a link.
Building the four screens — and why the countdown is the part that matters
So I built the set in Cue, the free tools at Starting Frame — specifically the Scene tool. Four screens, the ones every stream actually needs:
- Starting Soon — the early-bird holding card
- BRB — be right back, for when you step away
- Live — a clean lower-corner mark while you’re on
- Ending — thanks for watching, here’s where to find me
I spent maybe ten minutes picking colors and typing my text. And here’s what surprised me: the art was the easy part. The thing that actually made it feel professional was the countdown.
A static “Starting Soon” card is a poster. A “Starting Soon” card that says 4:32… 4:31… 4:30 is a promise. It tells the seven people who showed up early that you’re real, you’re coming, and they should stick around. That little ticking number does more work than any gradient ever will. Don’t skip it.
One URL. Paste. It’s live.
This is the part I keep telling people about.
When the set was done, I copied a single link. In OBS: Sources → add → Browser → paste the URL → set it to 1920×1080. The screen appeared. The countdown was already running. No download. No file folder. No install.
The whole configuration — my colors, my text, my countdown time — rides inside the link itself. Nothing’s stored on a server somewhere waiting to break or disappear. The link is the thing. If I want to tweak the color, I make a new screen and paste the new link. That’s the entire workflow.
I sat there for a second a little stunned that this is allowed.
When you’d want a PNG instead — and swapping mid-stream
The live URL is the move for anything with a countdown, because it has to keep ticking. But Scene also exports a transparent PNG per screen, and there’s a reason to want that.
If you’re compositing in an editor later, or you want a still card that never changes, the PNG drops in like any image. Use the link when it needs to be alive. Use the PNG when it needs to sit still.
Swapping screens mid-stream is just OBS doing what OBS does: each screen is its own browser source in its own scene. Click BRB, you’re on the BRB card. Click back, you’re live. You’re not loading anything — the pages are already there. (If you want to see how much this kind of free tool actually gets used, that’s the sort of thing I track on the Starting Frame stats page.)
You don’t need a subscription to look like you have one
I think a lot of us put off the small stuff because the small stuff has a price tag stapled to it. A holding screen shouldn’t cost a monthly fee. It shouldn’t cost an afternoon of downloads either.
It’s a link. You make it, you paste it, you’re done. The stream that day went up with a real countdown and four clean screens, built in the time it used to take me to find an overlay pack.
So if you’ve been waiting until you had the “right” setup — you already have it. The browser’s right there.
Make your Starting Soon screen. Go start.