Run your scoreboard from a Stream Deck

Running the camera and the scoreboard at the same time is a timing problem. A touchdown goes in, and the six points need to land before the kicking team lines up. When the scoreboard lives in a browser tab, that means finding the tab, finding the right button, and looking away from the field to do it.

A lot of ScoreLayer users already have a Stream Deck to support their streaming, doing nothing for the scoreboard...until today.

ScoreLayer now has a Stream Deck plugin! It covers the controls you reach for while the ball is in play: scoring plays, the game clock, periods, timeouts, possession and the penalty flag. It drives your scoreboard through the Peripheral Push API, so the overlay in OBS keeps running untouched and the control panel stays open on your phone if you want it there.

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The keys show you the score

A row of identical keys is hard to read under pressure. So every key that belongs to a team captions itself: the team's name on the top line, that key's live value underneath. A scoring key shows the score. A timeout key shows how many timeouts the side has left.

The names come off your scoreboard, so there is nothing to label by hand. Rename a team on the control panel and the keys follow within a few seconds.

Captions are cut to twelve characters, because Stream Deck shrinks an over-long title and takes the value underneath down with it. A long club name would cost you the number you actually need. If twelve characters leaves your club unrecognisable, set a short label like HOME in the plugin's settings; clearing that field returns the caption to your scoreboard.

Scoring plays on a single key

American football scoring sits on one American Football: Score action, with the play as a setting: touchdown, field goal, extra point, two point conversion, or safety. Drop it on a key, pick the play and the team, and one press is worth the right number of points. The server does the arithmetic and returns the new score, which the key then displays.

Safeties need care with the Team setting. It is the team receiving the two points, which is the defending side. A safety in team 1's end zone is two points for team 2.

American Football: Flag throws and clears the penalty flag, and the key turns green while the flag is out, so you can see at a glance whether you cleared it.

Rugby and basketball work the same way. Rugby: Score covers the try, conversion, penalty kick and drop goal. The points follow the scoring code set on your board, so a union match and a league match both come out right off the same key. Basketball: Score covers the free throw, the two pointer and the three pointer.

Add Score and Subtract Score move a team by one point on any sport, for the scores the presets do not cover. Press add four times in a second and the plugin sends one update worth four points; an accidental press cancelled by a subtract sends nothing at all.

The clock runs on the key

Start / Stop Clock toggles the clock and displays it. The key image is redrawn every second with the current time and a play or pause marker, green while the clock is running. It works the time out the way the overlay does, from the moment the clock was last started, so the number on your desk and the number on the stream stay in step.

A key that only toggled would leave you checking a screen to see what you had just done.

It also re-reads the scoreboard every few seconds. If somebody on the control panel stops the clock or takes ten seconds off it, the key catches up on its own.

Adjust Clock nudges the time by a fixed amount, set per key: +1 minute, +1 second, -1 second or -1 minute. Put all four on the deck and you can correct a clock that drifted against the hall timer without stopping play, because the nudge does not start or stop the clock. A clock three seconds fast is three taps of -1s, and those taps are collected into a single update, so the overlay moves once rather than three times. Tap in both directions by mistake and the two cancel out with nothing sent at all.

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Starting a period

Start Period holds a period number, and an On press setting that decides what the key does with your clock.

Start period is the default. One press sets the clock to that period's starting value and runs it, so on an American football board, period 3 puts twelve minutes up and begins the second half. It starts the clock straight away, which makes it a button for the moment play begins.

Set period only changes which period the board shows and leaves the clock completely alone. A running clock keeps running, at the same value. Two situations want this: you called the wrong period and need to relabel it while play continues, and you have something else driving your clock and only want the deck to move the period along.

The two modes are easy to tell apart on the deck, because a key that will run the clock draws a ▶ after its number. Both apply your sport's own rules for entering a period, so a basketball board grants that half's timeouts either way.

How many periods a board has depends on its sport: two for soccer, rugby and handball, three for ice hockey, four for American football and basketball, five for tennis, and for boxing however many rounds the bout is scheduled for. Half time, full time and overtime carry no number, so those stay on the control panel.

Timeouts and possession

Timeout is a toggle. Press it for a team and that team's timeout begins, which also stops the clock, and the key goes green while it runs. The caption counts down the timeouts that side has left, so the bank on the overlay and the number under your finger agree. Press it again to end the timeout early. It is an American football and flag football action, since those are the boards that carry a timeout bank.

Possession hands the arrow to a team, or clears it if that team already has it. It works on American football, flag football, rugby, pool and basketball.

A layout that fits a game

Eleven actions is enough to build a profile you can run a whole match from without paging. The deck in the photo above is laid out for American football:

• Top row: the clock, the four quarters, and the penalty flag.
• A column per team: touchdown, field goal and extra point stacked, with that team's possession and timeout keys alongside.
• Far right: the four clock nudges, +1m through -1m.

Both teams sit on one page, and the captions mean you are reading team names off the deck while you work. The keys you hit most during live play, the clock and the scoring plays, sit where you can find them without looking down.

Smaller decks are fine too. A Stream Deck Mini running the clock, two Add Score keys and possession covers a soccer or handball match, because the score, clock and period actions are not tied to a sport.

What stays on the control panel

The deck covers live play. Team names, colours and logos, down and distance, rugby cards, basketball fouls, and the breaks between periods all stay on the control panel, where you have a keyboard and time to think.

Keys report failures too. A 🔑 means the push token was rejected, a 🔒 means the account is not on a paid plan, and a ⚠️ means the action does not apply to that board's sport, which is what a field goal key pointed at a flag football game will show you.

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Getting it running

You need a Stream Deck, the Stream Deck app on version 7.1 or later, macOS 12 or Windows 10 and up, and a ScoreLayer account on a paid plan. The Peripheral Push API that the plugin runs on is a paid feature.

Setup is two fields, filled in once. Open your scoreboard's control panel, generate a push token in the Peripheral Push API card, and copy the Scoreboard ID and the token into any action's settings. Both are stored globally, so every key on every profile picks them up from there. If the token ever leaks, rotate it from the same card and paste the new one in.

Press Test Connection when you have pasted both in. It answers with the names of the two teams on the board it reached, so you can confirm you are pointed at the right scoreboard while there is still time to fix it.

Your OBS setup does not change. If the overlay is already running as a browser source, the deck starts driving the scoreboard behind it.

If you are putting a matchday setup together from scratch, the matchday streaming checklist covers the rest of the kit.

Set up the Stream Deck plugin →