Brain-picking -- TV used to display student projects

It may not be the exact answer but in our campus professors use projectors to show the students project to everyone. We don't have Apple TV on all our classrooms. But we use LanSchool to manage teaching instruction. The teachers can control, project a student screen to a projector or to the rest of the computers and a lot more.

We have a couple of Mac Minis hooked up to TVs that run continuos Keynotes of announcements and student projects.

We have two solutions:

1) HDTVs with a Mac mini strapped to the back. End-users use Chicken of the VNC to remote into the Mac mini to "drive" it. Filesharing is turned on and configured so that they can AFP files to the machine. PowerPoint and Keynote (we let them pick which they want to use for display)

2) Vizio HDTV with a thumb drive plugged into the USB port. The built-in TV software can be set to run a basic slideshow of images on the TV from the thumb drive. Note: you'll have to purge all the .DS_Store files and cruft from the FAT32 formatted HD to get a clean slideshows. I use http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/43134/cleanmydrive to automate this.

We have some kind of Cisco system, each TV has a network connected device, then there is a central content management system that is used to deliver to these.
We are talking quite a large number of TV's here though, your type of solution probably depends on the number of the devices you are intending to control.

I'm a fan of AppleTV if you can mange them on the network (we use about 60). With that said... what is the media? Photo's/Videos, etc. Most dumb TVs now-a-days will play a photo slideshow from a USB drive. If you just want something like that then go nuts like @damienbarrett does. There are tons of solutions depending on your circumstances.

We use a video over ethernet solution at our High Schools and Middle Schools to broadcast different slide shows to different parts of the buildings. We can also send the same video/audio to all TVs, for example sporting events, choral events and graduation.

We're looking for something scalable, but limited on cabling in our older buildings. I like the VoE/Cisco solutions so we don't have to purchase a ton more Apple TVs (ATVs) and dedicate a device to playing media per room. If we can do something centralized...that would be absolutely terrific. Can you guys shoot me some product/software info or link

I'm not opposed to ATVs on Ethernet because we have different subnets for our wired/wireless, so it won't overwhelm the ATVs we already have in the classrooms (but that would mean more cabling in older buildings). We would even be open to web-based (i.e., Flickr, etc.) options...but the media will vary from slideshows to photos to movies.

Ahhh... in that case I would recommend that you continue along the IP streaming methodologies. AppleTVs can be problematic and are going to require other devices to connect and display a lot of things. You can get IP streamers for a few hundred bucks and use any number of configurations. This is the sort of situation where I usually recommend bringing in an AV company to make sure you're not wasting money. I know that might seem counter-intuitive but I believe in having quality 3rd party support.

We use CatLink equipment at one High School but had an AV company come in and do the rest of our buildings. The self installed works but requires our resources to troubleshoot. The other buildings (in the past 5 years) haven't had an issue for some reason...