As one of the newer members of the Tightrope team I have been spending some time learning about how Tightrope customers are using both Cablecast and Carousel to provide useful and relevant  programming and information to their communities. Carousel was completely new to me; I had no idea how easy it is to operate, nor how powerful it can be. I ran across some very unique examples of how Carousel is being used in a number of different communities throughout the country, and wanted to share some of them with you in a post.

One of the great features in Carousel is its ability to read RSS feeds and display them either as a crawl, or more attractively, as a composed page. Carousel will read a multi-part RSS feed and automatically create pages based on criteria you select, such as bulletins per page, and number of pages for a specific  feed. This gives you the ability to provide a wide variety of useful and relevant local information, with very little effort. Basically, you set up the RSS feed, put it in the schedule, and then sit back as Carousel generates page after page of local, regional and national content.

The best way to illustrate the possibilities is by pulling some content from current customer websites. For example, the City of Burien, WA pulls  an  RSS  feed  from the  Washington State  Department  of Transportation.  There is a complete sequence of bulletins based on traffic conditions in the region. The city of Burien only needed to subscribe to the feed, set up the initial parameters, and Carousel generates page after page of useful relevant information.

TV3 in Brunswick, ME also utilizes RSS feeds to provide useful information to the community. In addition to weather from the National Weather Service, which is standard in Carousel, they also pull in weather alerts as an RSS feed, they pull in news from the state of Maine, an RSS feed from missingkids.com which lists missing children in Maine (it is available for every state), news from the University of Maine, and many others. Featured at right is an RSS feed from Maine.info listing festivals in Maine.

Looking beyond RSS, there are many other very cool applications of Carousel in a community television setting that are worth highlighting. One of our favorites is the way that Pittsfield Community Television has utilized Carousel to put together a pet adoption program.

Through Frontdoor, which comes with every Cablecast and Carousel server,  administrators  can define user  rights and roles.  For example, a role could be created that is called “Community Content Creator” and that role could be given the rights to create standard bulletins and submit bulletins to a specific zone. They can also be given the rights to upload content (in this case image files). They can also be limited to certain templates and given the rights to edit those templates. This role of “Community Content Creator”  could be given to any number of community organizations, or city departments, or departments within a high school or college, and each organization or department can then assume responsibility for their own content. Carousel can even be set up so that when new content is created, an e-mail is automatically sent to someone with a “Management” role, who can then approve the content and place it in the schedule. In the example on the left, the Eleanor Sonsini Municipal Animal Shelter in Pittsfield has been given user rights within Carousel and creates a pet adoption program that runs completely on Carousel.  They can upload the photo’s, write the descriptions, and with Carousel, they can even link the bulletins so that they create a complete pet adoption program.

Lastly, Carousel comes with standard templates that are used with forecasts and current conditions from the national weather service. A number of facilities have created their own templates, or modified existing ones , and the results  are very nice.  The following is one example, from Newburyport, MA.

The examples given above are just a random sampling of RSS feeds and community contribution scraped from the websites of PEG facilities utilizing Carousel. We would love to learn about how YOU are using Carousel.  There must be other great examples of utilizing RSS feeds and other examples of community groups or various departments submitting their own content. Also, what about great uses of streaming video, traffic cams, web cams, data capture and display, and the other myriad ways Carousel can be used. Let us know what you are doing so that we can share your applications with the rest of the Tightrope community.  Just send a note, and/or attach an example to steve.israelsky@trms.com and I’ll put them in the blog  to share with your colleagues.