What do we mean by live data?
Examples of live data can be anything from transport and traffic updates, weather and news to currency exchange rates for travel agents and room booking information in hotels and office complexes. A retailer might even link the screen system to their EPOS or stock inventory system. For internal and inter-office use, clients can display call centre statistics and production metrics to assist shop floor staff with their work.
Some live data is publicly available, like the weather updates but bespoke data is usually held internally by the business. So how do you get it onto the screens? We’ve developed a few methods to make it easy for you to show live data without the need to manually intervene once the process has been set up. It means you can be confident with the accuracy of the information and speed to screen of your displays.
Let’s start with the publicly available information. Weather and news information is often made available through a RSS feed. LiveSpace makes it easy to display this information in a page format or a scrolling marquee, you just need to choose how you want to display it on the screen. You can start by choosing one or our standard templates to display it with other information like images and video.
Transport and traffic information is also publicly available and supplied in a data feed by the relevant authorities, e.g. TfL and Highways England etc. LiveSpace takes this information and adds your location, making it personal and relevant to your audience.
Privately held information can be displayed on your screens too. If the data is held in a .CSV file it is easily imported and displayed on the screen. For more complex feeds and with your guidance, we could hand-craft the output to show the specific information relevant to your business. Some of this information is sourced via an API supplied by third party applications you might use.
Some of our clients use data from a large number of different feeds, some of which are supplied by third parties. All of this information is added to a central database and only the data relevant to the page is sent to the screens.
The creation of content using live data is a very sophisticated and powerful way to show your audience exactly what they need to see.