RSS feeds are a quick and easy way to deliver the latest information to your digital signage. News, life hacks, industry trends, and healthy lifestyle tips are all popular types of RSS feeds to bring into your digital signage. The best RSS feeds for digital signage bring enriching dynamic content right to your audience.
RSS or Really Simple Syndication lives up to its name. A short URL added to an RSS aggregator and it will pull in information in real time. In terms of digital signage, RSS means up to date information on your signage, without you having to update it daily. New and relevant information helps draw eyes to your signage frequently. Billboards and outdoor signage have been using this tactic for years by adding time and temperature to draw engagement.
Fake RSS Feeds or Variants
RSS is capable of pulling more than headlines as well. Many website management platforms, like WordPress have the ability to create RSS feeds natively from your website. This is a great way to pull new info from your website or blog with very little setup. With MRSS you can pull in media like pictures and videos. Many offshoots of RSS have popped up over the 20 years since its inception. Some of these RSS variants still advertise themselves as RSS, but due to their nonstandard format many of them will not work with some RSS feed aggregators. If a feed doesn’t work from a website, the issue likely isn’t with your RSS program, but more likely to be the website using nonstandard RSS formats.
Bring the best RSS feeds for digital signage directly to your screens with minimal effort using the Arreya RSS widget. All you need to do is pick which feeds you want. There are many options for displaying the content. Scrolling or marquee is a very popular option that allows viewers to see all the content while displaying more information in a readable, moving line. Another option allows you to list content from 1 to many in an outline format. There are also options for headlines and bullets.
Engaging RSS Feeds to Try
Some of the most common and engaging RSS feeds are from different categories. Following, we’ve listed our top choices by category.
Technology
- Slash Dot – http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdotMain
- Engadget – http://www.engadget.com/rss.xml
- The Verge – http://www.theverge.com/rss/index.xml
- Ars Technica – https://feeds.arstechnica.com/arstechnica/index
News
- CNN Top Stories – http://rss.cnn.com/rss/cnn_topstories.rss
- New York Times Home Page – http://www.nytimes.com/services/xml/rss/nyt/HomePage.xml
- New York Times Business News – http://www.nytimes.com/services/xml/rss/nyt/Business.xml
- Vox – http://www.vox.com/rss/index.xml
- NPR – http://www.npr.org/rss/rss.php?id=1001
- BBC – http://feeds.bbci.co.uk/news/world/rss.xml
Lifestyle Tips
- Lifehacker – http://lifehacker.com/index.xml
- Serious Eats – http://feeds.feedburner.com/seriouseatsfeaturesvideos
- Productivity 501 – http://www.productivity501.com/feed/
- Time Management Ninja – https://feeds.feedburner.com/TimeManagementNinja
Office Info
- Content Marketing Institute – http://contentmarketinginstitute.com/feed/
- Atlantic Business Journal – http://feeds.feedburner.com/AtlanticBusinessChannel
- Fortune – https://fortune.com/feed/
- Economist Business – https://www.economist.com/business/rss.xml
- Science – http://feeds.nature.com/nature/rss/current
Adding RSS into Arreya
Adding an RSS feed into an Arreya presentation is easy. In the Arreya Editor you can find the RSS widget under the Widgets dropdown. Simply drop any of these links into the field titled ‘Feed URL’ and it will show a preview of the feed for you to edit with the other options on the page. Additional instructions can be found here.
Dynamic Digital Signage
Digital signage has a significant advantage over traditional signage in the ability to have dynamic content. Content that changes will continue to attract and engage viewers over time versus signage that never changes. Even if you do update traditional signage, people may not expect it to change and not notice that it has changed. The easier it is to update your signage the better and there’s no easier way than with RSS that updates automatically. Attracting eyes with interesting new information will help them notice the other information and announcements you may include in your signage. With almost every major website in the world supporting some form of RSS there’s really no reason not to take advantage of easy dynamic content.