TikTok LIVE event teaser video: date and time on screen

Film 8 to 12 seconds of the host and the product in vertical, cut the best stretch with video trim, then burn the event date, time and time zone onto it as authored caption cues. Cues print exactly the text you give them, so "Fri Oct 9, 7 PM ET" cannot be misheard or misspelled by speech-to-text. On Sume that is $0.02 for the trim plus $0.20 for the caption job, $0.22 per teaser, from the docs read 2026-10-03.

The TikTok side comes from one page, TikTok Shop's LIVE Events article, read 2026-10-03. TikTok's public help pages did not load for me, so this post says nothing about limits it did not state.

What the TikTok page says

The table lists only what that page states. The teaser has to carry a time that is still true when people watch it, so these rules decide what you can promise.

Build the teaser

Trim first. Video trim needs a clip already on media.sume.com in your workspace, a start, and exactly one of end or duration, plus an Idempotency-Key. Import the source first if it lives elsewhere.

Then caption. Video captions take a public HTTPS video URL and cues with text, start and end. Authored cues skip speech-to-text, so a silent clip works. Put the date on one cue and the time and zone on the next so each stays readable.

curl -X POST https://api.sume.com/v1/video-captions \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SUME_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -H "Idempotency-Key: live-teaser-oct9-001" \
  -d '{
  "video_url": "https://media.sume.com/artifacts/example/teaser.mp4",
  "cues": [
    {
      "text": "LIVE Fri Oct 9",
      "start": 0.5,
      "end": 5
    },
    {
      "text": "7 PM ET - tap Notify me",
      "start": 5,
      "end": 10
    }
  ]
}'

Keep the time true

Write the time zone on screen yourself, since a viewer in another country will read your caption literally. If you move the event, the burned-in clip is wrong, so rerun the captions job with new cues from the same trimmed source rather than editing the old file.

Sume does not create the TikTok event, post the clip, or know your schedule. Check that the date and time match the event card before you publish.