Countdowns provide a uniquely powerful way to engage your audience before a major event goes live. Build up suspense and anticipation whilst letting your audience know when the event is happening. The Kentucky Derby is just around the corner so we built the above fullscreen countdown until the race starting time to demonstrate the power of our new Date/Time Countdown Widget!

The Date/Time Countdown Widget

The Date/Time Countdown Widget in Composer (which is running that countdown you see above) allows you to build any sort of countdown to an anchor date and time. In this case, we know the Kentucky Derby starts at 6:57 p.m. ET on May 7th for "the greatest two minutes in sports".

The widget will even count up past an event that has already occurred (as you might see in our example up top if you're reading this after May 7th). This widget is really powerful for building up anticipation ahead of a major event, new show airing, product launch and beyond. You can even create a countdown to put up on your monitor walls inside your studio.

Date/Time Countdown vs Timer Widget

You might be asking, what's the difference between this widget and the Timer Widget. The Timer Widget allows you to create a countdown by setting the end time as zero, but you can't define an anchor date/time. So maybe it makes sense to use the Timer Widget if, say, your show starts in 5 minutes. But not necessarily for an event in the somewhat distant future where it doesn't make sense to do that calculation for up-to-the-second precision.

Create Your Own Countdowns

Ready to start working with the Date/Time Countdown Widget in Composer? Learn more about using the widget in your own custom graphics, here.

Want the above Kentucky Derby Countdown graphic for your own production? We've added this free, customizable template to the Template Library. Add it to your own account, here.