Broadcast character generator: graphics & lower thirds for live streaming
In television, a character generator — always shortened to CG — is the machine that puts typed characters on screen over live video. It has nothing whatsoever to do with creating characters for a video game, and everything to do with the name strap under the person talking.
Two very different meanings
Search for “character generator” and you will mostly find tools for inventing game characters. That is the newer, larger meaning. The broadcast one is older: “character” here means a typed letter — the same sense as “characters per line” — so a character generator is a machine that generates letters on the picture.
The distinction matters practically, not just linguistically. If you are looking for broadcast software, search for broadcast character generator, CG software broadcast, or simply lower thirds — the last one is unambiguous and is what most people mean anyway.
What a CG actually puts on screen
- Lower thirds / name straps — who is speaking and why they matter.
- Bugs — the persistent corner mark: channel logo, LIVE badge, score, clock.
- Tickers — the crawl or roll along the bottom carrying secondary information.
- Full-frame pages — line-ups, results, standings, schedules, poll results.
- Event graphics — goals, cards, substitutions, breaking-news bands, alerts.
What a CG operator does
In a gallery, the CG operator types every name that will be needed before the show, arranges them in the order the director expects, and then plays them out one keystroke at a time on the director’s call. Between shows they build and adjust templates.
On a stream, you are the CG operator, the director and the commentator at the same time. That is a design constraint, not a limitation: it means the panel has to be typed in advance and fired with a single key, because you will not have a hand free for anything else.
From hardware boxes to HTML5
For thirty years a CG was a rack unit with video in and video out, keying graphics into the signal. Then it became software on a PC with a video card. Today, the same output can be a transparent web page composited by the encoder — the graphics are HTML and CSS, the data arrives over a WebSocket, and the GPU does the compositing.
The result on screen is identical. The difference is that a CSS template can be edited by anyone, a browser source costs nothing to deploy, and the whole chain runs on the machine you already stream from. Choosing broadcast graphics software →
Using one on a live stream
LowerThird Software is a broadcast character generator built for streaming rather than for a playout chain. It serves a transparent output page to OBS, vMix or Streamlabs, and gives you a control panel to type names, scores and headlines and fire them with a key. Setup in OBS takes about five minutes →
A CG built for streamers Type the name, press TAKE, and the strap animates on air. Ask for an early-access build.
Get early access