News ticker software: crawls, rolls and breaking bands
The strip of text along the bottom of a news channel is one of the most recognisable graphics in television, and one of the easiest to get wrong. This is what news ticker software has to handle, and how to build a ticker viewers can actually read.
Three kinds of ticker
- Crawl. Text slides horizontally across the bottom, continuously. Best for many short items; worst for anything a viewer must not miss, because they may join halfway through.
- Roll. Items replace each other in place, usually with a wipe or a flip. Easier to read, holds attention longer, carries fewer items per minute.
- Flipper / band. A single full-width strip that stays put and changes its contents — the classic “BREAKING NEWS” band. Highest impact, lowest capacity.
Speed, spacing and repetition
A crawl that moves too fast is decoration, not information. Around 90 to 130 pixels per second at 1080p is comfortable for most readers — slow enough to finish a sentence, fast enough not to feel stalled.
Separate items with a clear mark rather than a space, so one headline cannot be read as the beginning of the next. And accept repetition: a viewer arriving mid-crawl sees an item once, so a loop of six to ten items is far more useful than a loop of forty.
Readability on a compressed stream
A ticker is small text on a moving background, which is precisely the situation streaming compression handles worst. Three things help: a solid plate behind the text rather than a transparent gradient, a medium or bold weight rather than a light one, and a slightly larger size than broadcast would use, because your viewers are on phones.
Keep the strip a little above the very bottom edge, too. Player controls and platform chrome cover the last few percent of the frame on mobile.
Where the text comes from
On a live stream, the honest answer is usually “you type it”. That is a feature, not a shortcoming: manual entry never breaks, never rate-limits and never publishes something you did not read first.
In LowerThird Software the ticker is a list of messages you prepare before the show and edit during it, with a breaking-news band you can fire in one keystroke when something lands. How the rest of the graphics kit fits together →
A ticker you can drive live Prepare the messages, fire the breaking band with one key. Ask for an early-access build.
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