New Year's Eve 2026 countdown video: one clip for four time zones

New Year's Eve is Thursday 31 December 2026, and it does not happen once. A 10-second countdown made once (one still held for 10 seconds, ten caption cues for '10' to '1' plus the wish) can be reissued for four regions with four caption jobs. The whole set costs about $1.06 on Sume.

Wikipedia's New Year's Eve page, read 2026-10-03, says the first places to see the new year are west of the International Date Line (the Line Islands in Kiribati, Samoa and Tonga) and that American Samoa, Baker Island and Howland Island are among the last. It also lists fireworks, toasts, light shows and, in Japan, the ringing of bells, among customs. The practical point for a business: customers in different places reach midnight many hours apart.

What to build

Make one background still (the Image API; the docs' endpoint example lists $0.033 for bytedance-seed/seedream-4.5). Render it as a silent 10-second Timeline job with a music bed as soundtrack ($0.10 for the render, $0.125 for the bed). Then burn the countdown with one caption job whose cues are one second apart; because cues skip speech-to-text, a silent file is fine. For other regions, repeat only the caption job with different wish text or local-time wording.

Cue timing

Ten numbers at one second each, then the wish. Keep numerals large and the wish short, since each caption style groups words; use design overrides in the caption doc if you want to change placement or colour. Do not rely on the speaker saying the numbers: there is none.

import os, sys, uuid, requests

def main():
    key = os.environ.get("SUME_API_KEY", "")
    if not key:
        sys.exit("Set SUME_API_KEY first")
    body = {
        "video_url": "https://media.sume.com/artifacts/YOUR_ARTIFACT/clean.mp4",
        "style": "slam",
        "cues": [
            {"text": "3", "start": 7.0, "end": 8.0},
            {"text": "2", "start": 8.0, "end": 9.0},
            {"text": "1", "start": 9.0, "end": 10.0},
        ],
    }
    resp = requests.post(
        "https://api.sume.com/v1/video-captions",
        json=body,
        timeout=60,
        headers={"Authorization": "Bearer " + key,
                 "Idempotency-Key": str(uuid.uuid4())},
    )
    print(resp.status_code, resp.json())

if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()

Regional wording that stays true

Wikipedia's time-zone note is a reason to avoid saying 'the new year starts now' in a way that is wrong for most viewers. Say 'Your midnight is coming' or name the place. Post at the local time of the region the version is for; Sume does not schedule posts.

What Sume does and does not do

• Does: render the countdown and the regional caption versions as separate MP4s from one clean file.
• Does not: calculate local midnights or schedule posting.
• Does not: add fireworks footage unless you generate it; a video model clip would be an extra, separately billed step.