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How To Guide to Streaming Technologies and Internet Outreach
The variety happens in how you capture the feed, how you convert it and what host you choose.
“We started audio streaming in 1999 and have been streaming video since 2003. But two years ago, when the church went through a complete rebuild of its website, we took the opportunity to re-evaluate. We were with a content delivery provider that was fantastic, but they were expensive. We wanted to take the opportunity to explore different technologies.” — Michael Arman, Technical Coordinator, The Moody Church, Chicago, IL
“Technology for technology’s sake is such a dangerous game, because you are never going to finish. If newest and best is the goal, then you won’t reach it.” — Nathan Clark, Director of Digital Innovation, Northland, A Church Distributed, Longwood, FL
At its most basic, internet streaming is about taking an audio feed and a video feed, using an encoder to convert them to a format streamable over the internet, then getting that feed to a service provider who will host your videos in ways that people can easily access them. That’s the short version. The variety happens in how you capture the feed, how you convert it and what host you choose.
Making decisions about encoders and streaming providers
The Moody Church in Chicago recently went through a redesign of its streaming process. “We started audio streaming in 1999 and have been streaming video since 2003,” explains Michael Arman, the church’s technical coordinator. “But two years ago, when the church went through a complete rebuild of its website, we took the opportunity to reevaluate. We were with a content delivery provider that was fantastic, but they were expensive. We wanted to take the opportunity to explore different technologies.”
Moody Church hired 5Q Communications in Atlantic, Iowa—a virtual company that specializes in churches and parachurch organizations. 5Q introduced the Moody Church to Amazon’s Web Services (AWS) and they decided to test drive the service because of the huge cost savings.
“You pay only for the loads that you use,” Arman clarifies, “which greatly reduces the operating costs. We’re paying 85% less than we were with the content delivery network.”
A content delivery network or content distribution network (CDN) is a system of servers containing copies of data placed at various nodes of a network. The tradeoff in using a CDN or another streaming provider is usually about distance. The more hubs the provider has, the shorter the distance to get from the server to the person at their computer (or handheld). Moody chose to stream from Amazon’s server farm in Virginia—since that was the closest location to Chicago. They determined to evaluate this setup over six months to see if there were any issues. For Moody, the switch produced little negative feedback. So Moody deliberately keeps the church’s streaming lean (300k and 500k video streams) with a 22k audio stream for parts of the world that are still on dial-up.
At the same time, Arman chose to upgrade the encoder. “We had been running a Windows media encoder from a PC [that] wasn’t very volunteer-friendly,” he says. “We liked the idea of having an appliance with a smaller footprint instead of another computer in the booth. We tested out a number of demo units and chose Digital Rapids TouchStream. It was easy to install and has a nice graphic overlay. We appreciated the Touchscreen user interface and the elimination of logging into a computer.”
Arman continues, “I’m glad we had the opportunity with the web redesign to look through our whole process and catch up on the new technologies that are compatible with portable devices. I was not an ex- pert when we started this. We relied on 5Q to coach us on what was out there; I gave input on the user aspect and it was a good partnership. [I] would not have wanted to try this on my own at all.”
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Cathy Hutchison is the Director of Connection for Acoustic Dimensions. She can be reached at chutchison@acousticdimensions.com. .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
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ADD NEW COMMENTWe appreciate the kind words and focus of this article on live streaming of content for churches. Thanks! ~Five Q Team
Posted by John Schwartz on 09/26/2011 report abuse
Thanks for the comment, Eric. This article contains only three examples of how churches are streaming content. “Church Production” would love to cover more on this topic. So if you have story ideas, please contact the writer or the editorial staff at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).
Posted by Brian Blackmore on 09/07/2011 report abuse
One of our customers sent us this article and we are always looking for new ways to service churches. Q&A, and social tools are increasing, along with the use of the tools we sell, like Digital Rapids Streaming units and CDN services. It would be great if churches would share their technologies because it is for the Kingdom and not ours to hang on to. Eric - YourHost.com
Posted by Eric Kikhuff on 09/07/2011 report abuse