• Support

RSS News Feeds

Player Type: Scroll

Supported
Format	Comment
RSS 0.91 and 2.0	Must say "RSS" or "XML"
Unsupported
Format	Comment
Other feeds

Unlisted formats have not been tested.

Requirements

The NTB must have access to the Internet (or the network where the RSS feed is hosted)

The NTB must be subscribed to the newsfeed in the "Newsfeeds" page.

RSS Newsfeed Principles

RSS News Feeds can be shown as scrolling text on an NTB. Many broadcasters, newspapers and news agencies publish a large number of news feeds. Many organisations and groups also publish their own news in RSS format. There are so many newsfeeds that it is impossible to list them all. They could, however, classify them by source as follows:

1. News Agencies. E.g. BBC, Reuters, CNN.
2. Organisations that publish their own internal news. E.g. NASA, aka.tv (Digital Signage News), Internet Movie Database, etc.
3. Search Engines. E.g. Google, Yahoo, MSN.

News Agencies

• Individual Agencies could provide hundreds of different feeds covering a wide variety of topics.
• The BBC, for example, have a treasure-trove of newsfeeds covering news, sports, traffic and weather for many localised regions and interests and in many different languages.
• See http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/data/Data for full listings.
• Search the websites of other News Agencies for similar listings.

  Many Agencies have a Terms of Use policy that usually obliges you to show accreditation of the news source on the display. The Terms of Use for some organisations may be too restrictive to allow the use of their feed in Digital Signage.

Organisations

• News can be obtained from many different interest groups - your local sports club for example.
• Content can be more applicable and terms of use are usually less stringent.
• The feed may, however, be prone to human typing error and become improperly formatted from time to time.
• Your Organisation may have it's own internal RSS feeds.
• If not, you could publish one yourself - contact Support for advice.

  To playlist an news feed on an NTB you must first subscribe the NTB to the news feed.

How Subscribe an NTB to a Newsfeed

1. Browse to the newsfeed in a web-browser. These are usually found on certain websites by clicking on the orange buttons shown here or the word "RSS".

2. Copy the newsfeed address from the Address bar in the browser.

3. Log into the NTB and browse to 'News Feeds | Add'.

4. Enter a logical name (e.g. 'CNN Top Stories') and paste the newsfeed address that was copied earlier into the "RSS Newsfeed URL" text box and click the "Add" button.

You will get a confirmation message at the top of the page:

  Success? The newsfeed can now be added to a playlist. It may, however, need further editing see below.

How to Edit a Newsfeed Subscription

1. Browse to the "Newsfeeds" page and click the "Edit" button for the feed that you want to change.

If the newsfeed data changes frequently then you may want to reduce the refresh interval but making it too frequent may annoy the provider and force them to block access. For world news 15 minutes is recommended. For weather one hour is probably sufficient. For data held on your own network you could refresh every second if the data changes that frequently.

If the NTB is likely to loose contact with the newsfeed for more than one day then increase the maximum age. This is particularly important on demo NTBs.

Most newsfeeds are freely available so you do not need a user name or password to access them.

If you have configured the NTB to work through a Proxy then you must select the "Use Proxy" option if the newsfeed is hosted outside your organisation.

2. Click the 'Apply' button.

How to Create a Custom Newsfeed from a Search Engine

While Search Engines provide regular RSS newsfeeds by category, they also make it possible for you to get customised news on any topic under the sun.

The URL for the main Google News RSS feed is:

http://news.google.com/news?output=rss

To customise this newsfeed to deliver news for your topic, you need to add a query to the end of the the above URL as follows:

• The query will take the form:
• "&q=xxx"
• where xxx is the topic.
• E.g. "http://news.google.com/news?output=rss&q=iran"
• Use a plus "+" sign to add more words to the search query.
• E.g. "http://news.google.com/news?output=rss&q=iran+oil+supply"
• To receive your Google News RSS in a different language:
• Either add "&hl=xx" where xx is the language code,
• E.g. "hl=fr" for French
• Or change from Google.com to .xx where xx is a country code.
• E.g. "http://news.google.de/news?output=rss" for news from the German site
• The Yahoo News RSS items are a little more compact than Google ones.
• To get Yahoo News, use the following URL:
• "http://news.search.yahoo.com/news/rss?p=xxxx"
• where "p=xxxx" is the search query
• E.g. "http://news.search.yahoo.com/news/rss?p=iran+oil+supply"

How to Create your own NewsFeed

It is possible to write your own newsfeed and store it on the NTB. The procedure is as follows:

1. Write the news XML file, taking care to ensure that it complies with the RSS format. (See examples from news agencies like the BBC).
2. Save the file on your PC as News.xml (or a file name of your choice)
3. Upload the XML file into the media/RSS folder (or a folder name of your choice) on the NTB.
4. Create a new news feed subscription using the URL http://localhost/data/media/News.xml
5. Playlist the news feed in a zone.

To update the newsfeed:

1. Edit the original News.xml file.
2. Upload the new version to the NTB, overwriting the old one.

To get another NTB to read the newsfeed on the first NTB:

1. Add a new newsfeed subscription with the URL: http://<NTB_IP_Address>/data/media/RSS/News.xml
2. The user name and passwords will be the same as those used to access the host NTB