What is an OBS tally light — and why camera operators need one
A tally light is the red/green indicator that tells a camera operator whether their shot is on air (program) or queued up next (preview). OBS Studio has no built-in tally, so most crews either buy wired tally hardware or fly blind. CTD Tally is an OBS tally light app that reads OBS state over obs-websocket and shows a full-screen tally on the phone, tablet, or watch your operators already carry — green PREVIEW, red LIVE, gray STANDBY, with zero guesswork on a multicam shoot.
How CTD Tally works: scan a QR code and pick your angle
CTD Tally connects to OBS Studio's built-in WebSocket server (obs-websocket v5, OBS 28+). Each operator scans the QR code OBS shows under Tools → WebSocket Server Settings → Show Connect Info (or types host, port, and password by hand), then picks the OBS scene that matches their camera. State arrives as push events over the websocket — no polling — so the wireless OBS tally light flips the instant the director cuts, with a liveness watchdog that auto-reconnects a dropped socket instead of freezing on a stale state.
No extra hardware — use the iPhone or Android phone on the camera
This is the OBS tally light with no hardware to buy: no Raspberry Pi, no ESP32, no soldering, no wired tally box. Mount the iPhone, Android phone, or tablet you already own on the camera, leave the app frontmost, and it becomes a full-screen tally in portrait or landscape. Tap it for a distraction-free camera-mount fullscreen mode. It's the cheapest, fastest tally light for camera operators precisely because it runs on devices the crew already brings.
Tally that follows you: Apple Watch, Dynamic Island, and haptics
On iOS, the tally lives everywhere you look. A Live Activity keeps a colored dot and LIVE/PVW label in the Dynamic Island (or a lock-screen banner on phones without one), and the Apple Watch companion turns the whole watch face green in preview or red on air, with a haptic tap the moment you go live or get queued — the one tally feature no other OBS tally app matches. Connect once on the phone and the watch just follows. The Android build adds optional haptics on devices with a vibration motor.
Built-in confidence monitor: watch any OBS scene with a tally halo
CTD Tally is also an OBS confidence monitor on your phone. The Live Feed screen pulls stills of any OBS scene several times a second so operators can see what's actually going to air, framed by a halo that reflects that scene's bus state — green in preview, red when live. The Android build adds adjustable frame-rate presets (15/24/30 fps) so you can tune the live feed to your network. It's a lightweight OBS scene monitor that doubles as a tally, deep-linkable via ctdtally://feed.
Read-only by design: hand any volunteer a phone safely
CTD Tally only ever reads OBS state — it issues Get* requests and never switches scenes, starts or stops the stream, or touches anything in your production. That read-only design is the whole point: you can hand a phone to any volunteer camera operator without risking your show. Full OBS remote apps like OBS Blade, OBS Controller, and ProducerPad are scene switchers and control surfaces; CTD Tally is a purpose-built, read-only OBS camera tally app, so the only thing a nervous volunteer can do is watch the light.
Smarter, more honest tally: nested scenes, auto-reconnect, true OFFLINE
The tally is nesting-aware: if the director cuts to a composite scene — picture-in-picture, side-by-side, or a deeper group — that contains your camera, you still go red, because the app walks the scene tree (BFS over enabled scene items) rather than just matching the top-level scene. Disabled nested items don't count. And when Wi-Fi drops or you switch apps, CTD Tally shows an honest OFFLINE state on the Dynamic Island and Apple Watch instead of a frozen LIVE you can't trust.
Keep the tally live with the screen off (Android)
On Android, an optional "Keep connected in background" mode holds the OBS connection alive while the screen is off and pins a live tally status in a notification — so a phone clamped to a camera keeps showing the right state without anyone babysitting it through every green/red change. It's opt-in, runs as a foreground service so the OS won't kill it mid-show, and like everything in CTD Tally it talks only to your own OBS over your own network.
Accessible, color-blind-safe, and built for real productions
Every tally surface is triple-coded — color plus an SF Symbol plus the LIVE/PREVIEW/STANDBY word — so it never relies on red/green discrimination alone, with VoiceOver labels, a spoken announcement when you go live, Dynamic Type, and Reduce Motion support. The result is a color-blind-safe OBS tally light that works across iOS, watchOS, and Android (no Google Play Services needed). Crews use it for multicam church services, school broadcasts, esports, conferences, and concerts — every operator on their own device, picking their own angle.
