My big screen tv needs a sidecar of awesome.

April 13, 2014 8:30 PM

We're setting up our dream media room and I'd like to dedicate a second, smaller monitor that will be alongside our larger tv to displaying weather, scores, news, in a ticker-like fashion. I'm envisioning watching baseball games while the MLB Gameday thing follows along to the side. Or maybe a mock Wrigley-style old school school board of other games. Or weather advisories or news flashes being able to pop up while I'm watching a movie. Really, the possibilities are endless. What's my best way to do this?

Hooking the monitor up is easy. I have plenty of outputs and my HTPC has a lot of juice, so the meager needs of such a thing shouldn't be an issue. My question is how do I best provide content to the thing?

I dimly remember an episode of DIY's sometime fun, sometimes horrifyingly terrible Man Caves in which they used an online service to provide a continuously updating sports ticker. But when I tracked that down, the company they used is defunct. (FWIW, I'm not a "man cave" kinda guy. My wife and kid are fully on board for the ride. Just mentioning it as a place I saw a thing.)

And anyway, I'd like the info on my ticker screen to have a little more variety.

Should I custom build some HTML pages with free sports and weather tickers like people used to use on their home pages and just open them in the screen and full size them? Is there a way I can have it cycle through pages on a loop? Is there a community or service where people are putting such things together already?

posted by DirtyOldTown to Computers & Internet (2 answers total)

You might look at the Panic Status Board (mac-only, looks like) or an open-source version it inspired. Not sure about connecting it up to specific data-sources -- that'll probably require a bit of coding in a web language of your choice. Are you looking to aggregate things yourself or looking to DIY? (the solution I'm suggesting is pretty heavy on the 'yourself' part). There may be off-the-shelf services that do this, not sure though.
posted by Alterscape at 9:07 PM on April 13, 2014

Response by poster: I'm kind of figuring on self-updating pages, either via: pages that already exist somewhere for this purpose or an application that creates such; pages I build with widgets that update themselves; or, less likely, but still not off the table, scripts that scrape the stuff I want and funnel it back into pages of my making.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 9:06 AM on April 14, 2014