A speaker who cannot see a clock will run over. Not because they are careless, but because without a clock in their eyeline there is nothing to run against. The room fills, the slides open, and the next thing anyone knows the keynote has eaten the coffee break.
Event Timer is the fix and it is free. Set the slot, put it on the stage screen, and the speaker always knows where they are.
Open Event Timer. No account, no install, no cost.
What is a stage timer?
A stage timer is a large countdown clock placed where a speaker can see it, showing how much of their slot is left and warning them before it runs out.
You will see the same object called a speaker timer, a conference countdown timer, a presentation timer for events, or a stage clock. They are one thing. What separates a stage timer from a phone face-up on the lectern is that it is readable from where the speaker stands, it changes state before zero rather than at zero, and one person other than the speaker controls it.
The last part matters more than the hardware. A clock the speaker controls is a suggestion. A clock the room controls is a schedule.
What does Event Timer do?
It puts a full-screen countdown on the stage screen, warns in colour at two minutes and thirty seconds, sounds a gong at zero, and then counts how far over the session has run.
- A clock that fills the screen The digits scale to the display, so the same page reads on a 13-inch laptop propped on a chair and on a 4-metre LED wall.
- Colours that carry the message Green while there is time, amber under two minutes, red under thirty seconds. A speaker reads the state from across a room without reading a number.
- A gong and a flash at zero The screen shows TIME UP and inverts once a second. The gong fires once. Mute it if the room is wrong for sound, and the flash still runs.
- The overrun counts Past zero the clock counts up as a negative number, so the chair knows whether this is forty seconds or four minutes.
- Keyboard control Space starts and pauses, R resets, F goes fullscreen. A stage manager runs it without hunting for a pointer in a dark room.
- Eight presets and any custom length 3, 5, 10, 15, 20, 30, 45 and 60 minutes as buttons. Type 90 for ninety minutes, 5:30 for five and a half, 1:05:30 for an hour and five and a half. Cap is 24 hours.
- A session name above the clock Sixty characters for the speaker or the session, so the screen says who is on as well as how long they have.
- It keeps running when the wifi drops The deadline is wall-clock and the sound is embedded in the page, so once it has loaded there is nothing left to fetch.
The timer is one self-contained page. No build step, no dependencies, no server calls once it has loaded, and no sign-up. It runs on whatever laptop is already plugged into the switcher, including the locked-down AV machine at a venue that will not install anything.
How do you time conference speakers?
Put a countdown where the speaker can see it, set it to their finish time, agree what the colours mean before they walk on, and give one person the job of running it.
- Put it on the machine feeding the screen. Open the timer on the laptop driving the confidence monitor or the stage screen. Set the display to extend rather than mirror, drag the window across, and you keep your own screen to work on.
- Set the finish time, not the duration. Enter the time the speaker has left, not the length of their slot. Those are different numbers the moment a session is already running late, and the second one lies.
- Go fullscreen and read it from the stage. Press F. Then walk to where the speaker will stand and read the clock. If you cannot, the timer is not doing its job. That is the first item on our AV check for session timing.
- Test the gong through the PA. Sound levels in an empty room lie. Use the Play buzzer button during the tech check, through the venue system, on the machine that will feed the desk. If the gong is going to embarrass someone, better at eleven in the morning to an empty hall.
- Brief the speaker before they walk on. Tell them where the clock is, that amber means two minutes, that red means thirty seconds, and what happens at zero. The green room briefing prevents more overruns than anything you can do once they are on stage.
- Give one person the keyboard. One person starts and stops the clock for the session, and it is not the speaker. Space starts and pauses, R resets, F fullscreens.
Six steps, and five of them happen before the session starts. Timing a room well is a rehearsal problem wearing a stopwatch.
What size should a countdown timer be on a stage screen?
Big enough to read from where the speaker will stand, which is the only measurement that counts. Walk to the lectern and look. If you have to squint, the number is too small or the screen is in the wrong place.
Event Timer scales its digits to fill whatever display it is on, so the size question turns into a placement question. A 13-inch laptop propped on a chair at the front of the stage reads from about ten metres. A 4-metre LED wall forty metres behind the audience does not, because the speaker has to look past three hundred faces to find it.
Order of preference, in a room with one spare screen: a confidence monitor at the front edge of the stage angled at the lectern, then a screen on the floor in front of the first row, then the back wall. The back wall is where timers go to be ignored.
What should you set the timer to?
Set it to the slot on the run of show, minus whatever the chair needs for the handover. These are the durations we set most often, and they map to the presets on the tool.
| Slot | Timer | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Lightning talk | 5 minutes | Short enough that the amber warning arrives inside the talk, not after it. |
| Startup or product pitch | 10 minutes | Eight to pitch, two to land. The red state is the cue to stop selling. |
| Breakout session | 30 minutes | Leaves room in a 45-minute slot for questions and the walk between rooms. |
| Keynote | 30 to 45 minutes | Set it to 30 if there is a Q and A after, 45 if the slot ends with the talk. |
| Panel | 45 minutes | Give the clock to the moderator, not to the panellists. |
| Workshop | 60 minutes, reset per exercise | Reset with R at each exercise rather than running one long clock. |
Two rules sit under that table. Never set the timer to the slot when the session is already late, because the number the speaker needs is when to stop, not how long they were promised. And never round up as a kindness. A speaker given 32 minutes on a 30-minute slot will use 34.
Who should own the clock during a session?
One named person per session, and it is never the speaker. Give it to whoever is running the room: the stage manager, the chair, or the AV operator if the room has one.
Ownership is the part that fails most often, and it fails at handover. Session one ends, somebody closes the laptop lid, session two starts with no clock, and the room loses fifteen minutes before anyone notices. Write the owner into the run of show next to each session the same way you write the speaker, and hand the machine over in person.
Event Timer supports this by staying dumb. There is no queue and no agenda to load, so the handover is one keystroke: R to reset, type the next speaker’s name in the field above the clock, pick the duration, space to start. Someone who has never seen the tool can be taught it in the ten seconds between sessions, which is the amount of time they will have.
What do the amber and red warnings mean, in seconds?
Amber turns on with 120 seconds left. Red turns on with 30 seconds left. Both are fixed, and both are chosen for what a speaker can do with the warning.
Two minutes is enough to land a point and skip the last two slides. Thirty seconds is enough to finish a sentence and stop. A warning at ten minutes changes nothing, because nobody restructures a talk with ten minutes to go. A warning at ten seconds is a punishment, not a warning.
Brief the speaker on both numbers in the green room. A speaker who has been told that amber means land the plane will land it. A speaker who sees an unexplained colour change reads it as a rebuke, panics, and talks faster, which is the opposite of what you wanted.
What happens when a speaker runs over?
At zero the gong sounds, the screen shows TIME UP and inverts once a second, and the clock counts the overrun as a negative number that keeps growing.
The negative number is the useful half. “Four minutes over” is a fact a chair can act on and the next session knows what it has to make up. Without it, everyone in the room knows the session is late and nobody knows by how much, which is how a five-minute slip becomes a twenty-minute one by lunch.
Decide before the day who walks on and at what point. The timer will not do that part for you. Our escalation ladder is in what to do when a speaker runs over: the screen, then the chair standing, then the chair walking on, then the mic.
Is a stage timer better than presenter view?
For a speaker on a stage, yes. Presenter view shows the clock on the presenter’s own laptop, which is the one screen a speaker standing at a lectern is not looking at, and nobody else in the room can see it or reset it.
| Event Timer | Presenter view | Production tool | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cost | Free | Bundled with the slide software | Paid subscription |
| Setup time | Open a tab, pick a preset, press F | Already there, if the laptop is the presenter’s | Account, rooms, operator setup |
| Who sees the clock | Whoever the stage screen faces | The presenter, on their own laptop | Speaker, operator and any screen you configure |
| Remote control | No, keyboard on the host machine | No | Yes |
| Multi-stage | No | No | Yes |
| Messages to the speaker | No, a session name field only | No | Yes |
| Sound at zero | Gong, with mute and a test button | No | Yes |
| Works with no network | Yes, once the page has loaded | Yes | Depends on the tool |
The full argument against presenter view is in presenter view against a stage timer. The short version: it shows the clock to the one person who cannot act on it, and it dies the moment the deck is handed to an AV operator on a house machine.
What Event Timer does not do
It is a single-screen clock. There is no remote control, no second operator view, no message-to-speaker channel, no multi-room sync, no agenda import, and no log of what ran to time and what did not.
If you are running a production where a showcaller drives timers on three stages from a control desk, buy a production tool. We say so plainly in Event Timer against Stagetimer, and we buy one ourselves when the show calls for it.
Where Event Timer wins is the other ninety percent of rooms: one stage, one screen, one chair who needs a clock working inside the next two minutes.
Why we built it
C4E has run conferences, dealer meets and offsites for twenty years. Timing a room badly is expensive. A keynote that runs eleven minutes over eats the break, then the panel, then the goodwill of everyone with a flight to catch.
We kept reaching for a timer and kept finding two options. Production tools built for multi-stage shows, which are excellent and which we still buy when the show warrants it. Or presenter view, which shows the clock to the wrong person.
What was missing was a clock for the stage screen that took ten seconds to set up and cost nothing. So we built it for a show, kept using it, and put it online because the problem is not ours alone.
More on running time well
- Five speaker timers compared, conflict of interest declared up front.
- What to do when a speaker runs over, the escalation ladder we use.
- How to brief a speaker on timing, the thirty seconds in the green room that saves the session.
- A run of show that survives contact with the day.
- The AV check for session timing, sightlines first.
- Stagetimer alternatives, and when not to bother.
- Event Timer against EventTimer.io, two free browser timers with near-identical names, one of them ours.
All of our tools, and what we buy rather than build, are on the tools page. If you would rather hand the whole problem to someone, that is what we do for a living.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Event Timer free?
Yes. It is free with no account, no install and no payment. Open the page and use it. C4E built it for its own conferences and released it publicly.
Does Event Timer work without an internet connection?
Load the page once and it runs in the browser. The countdown deadline is wall-clock and the buzzer sound is embedded in the page, so nothing is fetched after it loads and it keeps working when the venue wifi drops, which on a show day it will.
Can I use Event Timer on a TV or projector?
Yes. It is a web page, so anything that shows a browser will show it: a projector fed by a laptop, a hotel screen on an HDMI run, or a smart TV with a browser. Set the laptop display to extend rather than mirror, drag the window to the second screen and press F for fullscreen.
Does Event Timer work on an iPad?
It opens and runs in Safari or Chrome on an iPad, and the countdown, the colours and the gong all work. Fullscreen is a browser feature and iPadOS has restricted it in the past, so press the fullscreen button on the device you plan to use before the show rather than during it.
How do I show a countdown to conference speakers?
Open Event Timer on the laptop feeding the stage screen or confidence monitor, pick the session length, press F for fullscreen, and put that screen in the speaker’s eyeline. Tell them in the green room that amber means two minutes left and red means thirty seconds.
Can two people control Event Timer?
No. It is a single-screen timer driven by keyboard from the machine it runs on: space to start and pause, R to reset, F for fullscreen. If you need a second operator view or control from another device, use a production tool such as Stagetimer.
What is the difference between a stage timer and a presentation timer?
None, in practice. Stage timer, speaker timer, conference countdown timer and presentation timer all describe a countdown the speaker can see from where they stand. The real distinction is against presenter view, which shows the clock on the presenter’s own laptop where a speaker at a lectern cannot use it.
What happens when a speaker runs past their slot?
The screen shows TIME UP and inverts once a second, the gong sounds unless muted, and the clock counts the overrun as a negative number so everyone can see how deep it is. That number is what gives a chair the authority to step in.
What do the colours mean?
Green while there is time, amber with 120 seconds left, red with 30 seconds left. The point is that a speaker reads the state from the back of a room without having to read the digits.
Can I turn the buzzer off?
Yes. There is a mute toggle, and a Play buzzer button so you can test the level through the venue PA before the session starts. Muted, the screen still flashes TIME UP and the overrun still counts.