Lots of news channels post their video feed online, for free, legally.
Pulling up each feed is a pain, and I don’t actually want to watch all of them: I just want to see, at a glance, what each network/channel/outlet is covering, so I can get a sense of what the big story of the day is.
The feeds would all have to be on mute, obviously.
Some video feeds that could be included:
- Al jazeera
- ABC News (Australia)
- DW News
- RT News
- NBC News Now
- Sky News
- i24
- PTV (Pakistan)
- NDTV
- Press TV (Iran)
- TRT World
And these are just streams that are posted legally. If anyone wanted to incorporate pirate streams, we could add a TON.
Alternately: If displaying a ton of live feeds is too taxing on a processor, it could just show a collage of screenshots from each feed, updated every 60 seconds. That would be easier for processing, and it might sidestep any legal issues.
Try youtube miltiviewer or viewsync. Haven’t tried them myself but apparently you can watch multiple youtube videos/streams at once. Probably a limit on how many.
I remember having abc news live on in the background in the first week of covid, I found a 24 hour stream of news means you’re getting the news as it breaks but; 1) if there’s no breaking news you’re just hearing the same news said differently over and over again 2) there’s no point hearing breaking news as it breaks because I’ll just be trying to go to sleep amped after hearing of the latest bloodshed, and nobody’s around who wants to discuss it anyway. 3) just bad for my anxiety, even if there’s something that directly affects you, there are also 90 other things that don’t affect you that you also can’t change. These little things can erode your mindset. I found a text based RSS feed a good alternative
Regardless, a lot of people have family in dangerous places right now and I understand wanting to know whatever you can as soon as possible.
Thank you for this! I will test out these solutions.
And I 100% agree with you on your points re: TV news. I actually hate TV news, and watch as little of it as possible. This idea is more about getting a single data point (what does TV news think is important right now) as opposed to a way to stay informed generally.
ACTUALLY, on the topic of RSS feeds: I’m also looking for a way to put a constantly-updating RSS feed up on my HTPC, for all the reasons you named. So far, the best tool I’ve found is RollGator. But do you know of any others?