I'm looking for software that will run a waiting room lobby TV. It needs the following features to be always on the screen.
* our personal news & events scrolling.
* our personal image & video gallery.

Something similar to the TV Guide Channel or Weather Channel where there is text plus videos and photos. I've been googling for an hour or two and have not been able to come up with anything.

Couldn't you just create a slideshow and have it loop forever?

We have a forced news like that. The system runs loops of video. Each day or each some time period a new loop is posted to the server. The entire media is created by some person(s).

I'll be more specific:
* This will be used in schools and administrative buildings. Namely waiting rooms & lobbies.
* We have a calendar database filled with event news - this has to be an overlay on the screen and can be updated at any time. This will be sql queries or rss/ical feeds - Query existing Drupal, Moodle, & various calendars for events and news.
* The background will be photos and maybe videos.
* The end users know nothing about resizing images and movies. They don't have time to create and update Impress/PowerPoint presentations - they just want to save images and videos into a folder and have it appear on the screen. (We've already implemented this in our schools as a photo slideshow screensaver but it doesn't have text-over.)

The only thing I've found so far is that is workable an full screen web-browser with some html5/css3 effects effects:
http://tobia.github.com/CrossSlide/
http://html5-fullscreen-video.cesero...screen/movie/1

I tried using ffmpeg to combine images and movies and subtitles into one file and loop a video. But this looked choppy and non-professional.

I'm open to ideas.