Modern-Day Pointcast Replacement? 35
toastyman asks: "Is anyone out there using anything similar to what Pointcast used to be? For those who don't remember, Pointcast was a screensaver/taskbar program from the late 90's that constantly displayed news, weather, stock quotes, and more. Pointcast is gone now, but one of my clients wants something similar to install on a few PCs/monitors in a waiting room and have them display the local weather, headlines, sports scores, whatever. Unless there's a pointcast-like screensaver out there that I'm missing, the closest thing I can think of would be some kind of RSS reader meant for full screen unattended operation. It has to be easily readable from a distance, automatically rotating what is displayed on the screen (think automated Powerpoint presentation) and automatically updating the content. Has anyone come across something that would work well for this? If not, does the idea of an 'informative' screensaver sound appealing?"
Macromedia? (Score:1, Interesting)
At one Fortune 100 company I worked for, they had their own internal broadcasting (as in Television) group. With that came their own cable system (as in Cable TV). Each of the facilities at the different campus locations had their own "channel" which was really just Powerpoint running in a loop with timed slides, then the video out was being sent to a TV capture card, and then piped over the cable system.
Almost anyone had the skills to do a basic Powerpoint, and it was rather low-tech. Only hard part is getting the video signal distributed. You might be able do do video over IP with some sort of streaming media server, as in Apple's streaming media server.
Pointcast HTML engine (Score:4, Interesting)
It's been ages since I've used pointcast, so I don't even remember how one went about enabling it's browser (rather than just have it pass the URL off to Netscape or IE).