Singles' Day 24-hour sale: hourly drop clips from one template

Singles' Day (11 November) was turned into a shopping event in 2009 as a 24-hour sale, so the natural content shape is a drop every few hours. One clean 6-second clip, trimmed once and captioned eight times with a different price line, gives you eight drops for about $1.62 on Sume, with no new footage.

Background is from Wikipedia's Singles' Day article, read 2026-10-03: the date was chosen because the numeral 1 resembles a bare stick; the page credits Alibaba and its CEO Daniel Zhang with turning it into a 24-hour discount event with online sales starting in 2009; and the page says 2025 sales passed US$150 billion. Those are Wikipedia's figures for Alibaba-reported sales and I did not check them against Alibaba. 11 November 2026 is a Wednesday. The budget side is in the earlier Singles' Day budget post.

The pattern: one clip, eight lines

Pick or generate one product clip. If it is longer than you want, cut it once with Video trim (start, plus exactly one of end or duration, $0.02 per job). Then run one caption job per drop with authored cues, which skip speech-to-text. Each job returns a new MP4 and leaves the source alone, so eight price lines are eight jobs on the same clean file.

Hourly drops, not hourly shoots

A 24-hour sale has a natural clock, so write the eight lines first: hour 0 'starts now', then the first drop, a halfway line, the last-four-hours line and the final call. Put the deal in the caption, not baked into the footage, so a wrong price is a $0.20 fix rather than a new generation. To change the look of a finished caption job without transcribing again, pass source_caption_id and a new style.

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": "11.11: drop 3 of 8", "start": 0.0, "end": 2.5},
            {"text": "Ends at midnight", "start": 3.0, "end": 5.5},
        ],
    }
    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()

Queueing many items

If the drops are Format runs rather than caption jobs, a bulk queue accepts up to 100 items with a concurrency window, and each child is an ordinary run with its own receipt. Read the status of the queue at GET /v1/format-run-queues/{id}.

What Sume does and does not do

• Does: keep one source clip and burn eight different lines into eight MP4s.
• Does not: schedule the posts or connect to a marketplace. Upload steps are yours.
• Does not: check that a price is legal or accurate in your market.