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May 2012

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Interconnecting through Internet Streaming

Our three experts weigh in with advice on numerous mistakes churches commonly make.

by Jim Kumorek

"For The Chapel, it was about allowing thousands of other people to attend church in their own community, worship with a worship leader and live band, and then receive the highest quality teaching via video from the transmitting campus," states Bruce Smith of Church Solutions Group in Chicago, Ill. He's describing why their client, The Chapel, uses streaming to bring one pastor's teaching to multiple campuses around the greater Chicago area.

Having explored numerous options such as satellite, fiber, sneaker-net (manually carrying the video to the campuses), and streaming, The Chapel chose streaming using encoders and decoders from HaiVision (Montreal, Quebec, Can.) as their solution. The Chapel takes a live video feed of their teaching pastor, encodes the video into a format that can be transmitted over the Internet, and sends that video to each of their remote campuses. At each remote campus, it is decoded by another HaiVision decoder and recorded for later use at that campus or in some cases, shown time-slipped by just a few minutes.

The Chapel isn't alone - many churches are looking to expand their reach through Internet video. And streaming isn't only for transmitting video between campuses.

"Streaming media, the live transmission of audio and video over the Internet, has provided faith-based organizations with a cost-effective way to reach anyone, virtually anywhere, through computers, cell phones and mobile devices," states Dave Stoner, president and CEO of Plano, Texas-based 's ViewCast. Streaming enables a church to make their church services and events available immediately, expanding the reach of your church to people unable to attend in person.

What Is Streaming?

Streaming enables you to take any audio or video source and use the Internet as your method of transmission, opening up the communication to anyone in the world.

"At a basic level, there are four key steps in a typical streaming setup, with the content following this linear flow," explains Mike Nann, director of marketing and communications for Digital Rapids of Markham, Ont., Can.:
audio or video source → streaming encoder → streaming distribution server or service → viewer or listener

"The streaming encoder is used to transform the source signal," Nann continues, "into a web-friendly stream. This transformation involves compression (to ‘squeeze' the video and audio signals down to a data rate that can be streamed over network and Internet connections) and ‘wrapping' the compressed video and audio into a format and protocol used to transport the content."

For campus-to-campus transmission, the video signal is then sent directly to the receiving campus's decoder. But for "broadcasting" to numerous viewers, another path is taken.

"The resulting stream is sent from the streaming encoder to a distribution (streaming) server or external service (Content Delivery Network, or CDN)," says Nann, "from which the content is delivered to viewers. Note that in a typical situation with multiple viewers, there is generally not any direct connection between the viewer and the encoder - they connect only to the distribution server or CDN."

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Jim Kumorek is the owner of Spreading Flames Media, providing video/media production and writing services to the A/V/L, technology, architectural and hospitality industries. He has led audio, video and lighting teams in churches as both staff and a volunteer for over 10 years. He can be contacted at james@spreadingflamesmedia.com.