With the RSS reader plugin, you can embed content from external sites that publish data in a RSS feed.
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RSS feed is a format that is machine-readable, so our software can read the data and format it in a way it’s presentable on a screen.
Other digital signage RSS plugins: RSS Ticker, MediaRSS
* RSS – Really Simple Syndication (Wikipedia article on RSS)The RSS feed search is a convenient functionality, unfortunately, there is no standardized way for websites to publish and make their feeds searchable. The search has data for the most popular news outlets, however, we don’t have the feeds for all websites on the Internet. You can try using a search engine to find the feed URL or contact the website maintainers and ask them if they have a public RSS feed.
This plugin requires an Internet connection, otherwise, it will be hidden.
The plugin will fetch the feed every time it is shown. In case you have the plugin on a slide with a longer duration (for example in a zone with the “play forever” option), the plugin will also check for feed updates every 30 minutes.
Both are XML-formatted data structures and both can contain images, so differentiating them can be confusing. News sites and blogs often publish an RSS feed whereas paid content from 3rd party providers for digital signage is mostly MediaRSS.
RSS was not originally designed to contain media (images, videos), so there is no standardized location of where the image element is positioned in XML. This plugin looks at 6 locations in the XML structure to find if the entry contains an image, but it can be just text as well. The image in the RSS feed is typically a thumbnail, meant to complement the text rather than be shown as full screen. MediaRSS was designed to address the shortcomings of RSS and each <item> contains the media inside <media:content> tag, so it’s always in one place and the media item is the core of the content (rather than a complementing thumbnail as in RSS). Another noteworthy difference is that the media items inside Media RSS contain a duration, so the feed itself defines how long each item is shown. To sum it up, media RSS can be considered as an RSS feed with a clearly defined image location and duration.
Most people think designing content for digital signage is super difficult, but if you can use Powerpoint, you can also create and design your own content in our editor.