<P> A news ticker (sometimes called a "crawler", "crawl" or "slide") is a primarily horizontal, text - based display either in the form of a graphic that typically resides in the lower third of the screen space on a television station or network (usually during news programming) or as a long, thin scoreboard - style display seen around the facades of some offices or public buildings dedicated to presenting headlines or minor pieces of news . </P> <P> News tickers have been used in Europe in countries such as United Kingdom, Germany and Ireland for some years; they are also used in several Asian countries and Australia . In the United States, tickers were long used on a special event basis by broadcast television stations to disseminate weather warnings, school closings, and election results . Sports telecasts occasionally used a ticker to update other contests in progress before the expansion of cable news networks and the internet for news content . In addition, some ticker displays are used to relay continuous stock quotes (usually with a delay of as much as 15 minutes) during trading hours of major stock market exchanges . </P>

The commercials that run across the bottom third of a tv screen are called