Tickers, news and RSS feeds on screens

A ticker is a line of text that scrolls along a strip of the screen, usually at the bottom. In Casty you add one with the RSS Ticker widget, which reads items from an RSS feed: a news site, your own blog, or a dataset of your own messages. Schedule it as an overlay and it runs over whatever else is on the screen. It's best kept for short updates, such as tonight's kick-off time or a class that's changed studio.

When a ticker earns its place

Tickers suit short updates that change during the day and don't deserve a whole slide: "Kitchen closes at 9 tonight", or "6:30 spin has moved to Studio 2". A hotel lobby or an office reception might use one for news headlines, so there's something fresh on screen without anyone writing it.

They're a poor fit on menu boards, where they pull eyes away from the prices, and on small screens, where a strip along the bottom takes space you can't spare. If you can't say what a ticker is for, it's probably clutter.

Feeding a ticker from RSS

RSS is a format most news sites and blogs publish: a web address that lists their latest articles. Drag the RSS Ticker widget onto a layout, paste the feed's address into Feed URL, then choose how many items to show and whether to take them from the start or the end of the feed. Until it has a working address, the widget shows a red message on the canvas saying so.

There are designs to start from. Articles shown in a marquee gives you the classic scrolling strip, and Title Only shows just the headlines, which is usually all a screen needs. You can also place each part of an item yourself (the headline, the date, the image) and style it like text. The help page on widgets and what they do lists the settings.

Your own messages in a ticker

For your own updates, keep them in a dataset, a simple table in Casty where each row is one message. Casty can publish a dataset as an RSS feed, and the ticker reads it like any other feed. Whoever's on shift edits a row and the ticker changes, without anyone opening the layout editor. It takes a little setting up the first time, so ask us and we'll help. Showing live data with datasets explains datasets in general.

Running it as an overlay

You rarely want a ticker built into every layout. Build it once as its own layout, with the ticker strip along the bottom and nothing anywhere else, then schedule it as an Overlay Layout. It plays over the top of whatever layout is on the screen, for the hours you set. The help page on priority, interrupts and overlays has the steps, and it's worth checking the overlay with Preview before you schedule it.

Leave room for it. If your main layouts put prices or times along the bottom edge, the overlay will sit right on top of them, so keep that strip clear on any screen that gets a ticker.

Keeping it readable

Moving text is harder to read than text that stays still, so give it every help you can. Make the strip tall enough for big text, put the words on a solid band of colour with strong contrast, and keep each item short. A headline that takes twenty seconds to cross the screen is one most people won't finish.

Keep the number of items down too. Five current headlines that come round often are more use than thirty that take ten minutes to cycle through. And bear in mind that constant scrolling is hard going for some people; making screen content accessible has more on that.

Other feeds you can show

RSS isn't the only live feed. The widgets toolbox also has:

• Calendar, which shows events from an online calendar using its iCal address. It suits a hotel's function rooms or a pub's events diary.
• Webpage, which shows a web page inside the layout, such as a live score page.
• Mastodon, for recent posts by hashtag or account.
• Emergency Alert, which reads alerts from a Common Alerting Protocol feed.

Weather isn't in the toolbox by default. If you want it, ask us.

Feeds need the internet, and you don't write them

Feeds update over the internet, so if the venue's connection drops, a ticker can't fetch anything new until it's back, and a web page won't show at all. Everything you've uploaded carries on playing from the player's own storage, as what happens to your screens when the internet drops explains.

With an outside feed you also don't choose the headlines. A news ticker can run a grim story right under your happy hour offer. Pick feeds that suit the room (sport for a pub, your own blog for a cafe), and check the publisher's terms allow their feed to be shown in a business.