With the digital signage RSS ticker plugin, you can embed external RSS feeds as a ticker (text scrolling from right to left). At the core, RSS is just a text file in XML format that websites frequently update when a new story is published. Most news portals and blogs also publish an RSS feed, typically the feed is linked in the page footer or you can find it by searching. We have a convenience function to help you find an RSS feed by a website name, however, it’s just a helper functionality and does not have data for all the feeds on the Internet. If you don’t find the desired feed using the search field, you can try using a search engine or ask the website maintainers if they have a public RSS feed. An example RSS feed looks like this: https://playsignage.com/feed/
When logged in, find the playlist you want to add it to, open the playlist, and find the RSS Ticker plugin under RSS.
Options
Find RSS feed – A simple search to find an RSS feed, it has data for popular publications.
Feed URL – If you did not find desired feed via the search (or the feed is not publicly available), you can paste the feed URL directly.
Include title – Typically each feed entry contains a title and a description. Depending on who publishes the feed and what information you find relevant, you can toggle title inclusion in the ticker.
Include description – Often description is a small excerpt of the article itself, typically it’s either too long or irrelevant for the ticker, but depending on the circumstances you may want to include it as well.
Feed entries to display – Specifies how many most recent feed items will be included in the ticker.
Refresh interval – Specifies how often the plugin will check the feed source for updates. The default value of 60 minutes is quite reasonable for most feeds.
Always on top – By default, the ticker is rendered as a separate element so that players don’t need to render the entire slide for each frame, but rather just the ticker itself. This is important as most entry-level players can not handle rendering the entire canvas at least 24 times per second for smooth scrolling. The drawback to this approach is that the ticker will be on top of other elements, this can be a problem for a typical setup where users want the ticker to scroll under a logo for example.
Auto – Player will automatically determine if it should be on top.
Yes – Smoother scrolling, see.
No – Depending on the player’s hardware acceleration capabilities, the ticker may struggle.
Alternative RSS viewers
If the RSS ticker plugin doesn’t fulfill your needs, you can display RSS feeds using alternative RSS viewers. Namely, you can embed RSS feeds via 3rd party applications using our website plugin.
RSS.app is a great alternative to our RSS Ticker as they provide a bunch of awesome feeds like twitter, Google News, Reddit, Facebook, Youtube, Telegram, Pinterest, eBay, Tumblr, NYTimes, CNN, USA Today, BBC News, Washington Post, Vogue, CryptoCurrency News, Yahoo, Sky Sports, Reuters, Fox News, The New Yorker, ESPN, CBS Sports, NBC Sports, MLB.com, NHL.com, Sports Illustrated, CNN Business, CNET, TechRadar, World Health Organization, Al Jazeera and lots more.
Another great alternative is feed.mikle.com, we’ll show you how it works
Go to https://feed.mikle.com and create an account (The first feed is for FREE) 2019 Update: they have changed their pricing and now it costs 0.75$ per month (9$ annually)
When you logged in go to Create Widget in the top right corner and choose RSS feed.
Find your RSS feed, paste it in Type new URL, and click +
Now do your settings like size, colors, etc., and when done click Save & Get Code. A box pop up, click Get iFrame version, and copy only the URL.
Go back to your playlist, add our Website plugin, and paste the URL into the Website
You’re all done!
FAQ
My player can’t render player smoothly if always on top is set to “no”, but I still need to scroll it under an element.
Depending on the circumstances, you may be able to leverage the fact that sub-playlists are always rendered on top of other elements, including tickers. So in this example, the BBC logo is actually a sub-playlist with just 1 slide set to play forever. The BBC logo we’ve been using is 267×200 pixels, so we created a playlist with that aspect ratio. Next, we set the slide to play forever and added the BBC logo on the first and only slide covering the entire canvas. Then we went back to the playlist and included the logo as a sub-playlist so the ticker would scroll underneath it.
What happens if my player doesn’t have an Internet connection?
The player will store the feed in a temporary cache after the first successful load. If the device does not have an Internet connection on the first load, the plugin will not be visible. Subsequent loads will display a feed from the previous successful load until the next update is successful.
Is the digital signage RSS Ticker the same as the Ticker?
No, the digital signage RSS Ticker is using a feed based upon the standard RSS, where the Ticker is simple text.
