Cameras, audio, control consoles, projectors and screens are all in place and worshippers are sharing regularly in rich, engrossing multimedia experiences. What's next for the media-savvy house of worship?

At many churches, the media director is thinking "streaming." Brad Matheson, for instance, music associate for instrumental music at Roswell Street Baptist Church in Marietta, GA, thinks streaming video over the Internet is a natural future step. "We're considering streaming," he says, "to achieve a greater outreach. It's a slice of the pie that hasn't been reached yet."

With the Internet becoming so ubiquitous, and many technology tools falling drastically in price, it's natural to picture adding a video welcome message to your website, webcasting your Sunday services live, or using video programs to reach worldwide audiences through the net. But experts caution that streaming video is more complex than it may seem.

And as with so many other options, the really important part is the planning you do before you buy anything. There are hardware and software choices to be made, certainly. But basic decisions about goals must be made first. And churches with established video operations already have a big head start on the technology front, notes David Caulton, product manager at Microsoft's Digital Media Division.

When it comes to adding internet media, Caulton says, "they are nearly there. Most folks who want to start streaming don't even have the video production side of things down, and that's actually the hard part."

But even the most accomplished church leader can feel a little lost in the network realm. To navigate through the many available options, it's vital to make sound decisions up front.

"One of the first things we ask our clients is to identify their audience," says Kathy Dotter, senior training analyst at Vertex Solutions, a Falls Church, Virginia-based consultant. "If they're all over the country and not all are connected to the internet, then streaming media is probably not an appropriate choice.

"Also critical," she goes on, "is exactly what you're trying to accomplish." Dotter notes that many churches want to use a brief video message from the pastor on their website "to create a sense of contact and give people a feel for what the church is like." While that sort of internet video can be relatively easy to achieve, other approaches can be much more complex.

Basic terms
There are two kinds of broadcasts-live and on-demand-and two ways to deliver content-downloaded and streamed.

Downloading means the entire file containing either video or audio is downloaded to the user's computer first, then played back. The file transfer can be slow if users have slow connections, and downloading can really tie up a server.

Streaming, however, means the user's computer can start playing the video back almost immediately, and then receive new data through the net just as it's needed to keep the video running. The speed of the user's internet connection is still critical, but the long wait for the video to start can be minimized.

"A live broadcast is always streamed," Caulton says. "This is where an event is sent out to an audience across the web and every single audience member sees the same thing at the same time. On-demand is an archive of an event that an audience can access at any time. This is really the strength of the web because each audience member connects to and views the content when they want to. On-demand content can be either downloaded or streamed."

Understanding your audience, their internet connectivity and your own, will shape basic decisions on such points as posting streaming video on your own computer or contracting with a third party host.

Connections are key
Even though high-speed connections like DSL lines and cable modems are becoming more common, "most of the country is still based on 28.8," says Dotter. Even the 56K modems that come standard on most home PCs will rarely actually operate at that maximum speed.

Many video creators solve this problem by publishing their video in a choice of download speeds, so the user can click boxes listing either a connection speed or a type of connection. Systems like Pinnacle's StreamFactory can generate up to four simultaneous web data streams from the same input data, each with different data rates, frame sizes, and so on.

Users experience these differences in the form of larger or smaller video windows on their computer screens, smoother or jerkier motion, and better levels of resolution, contrast, and other picture quality elements.

Dotter also suggests churches decide what type of media player to recommend to their congregants. The most common players for Internet media are Windows Media Player and Real Player from RealNetworks. Both are widely available free of charge, and the church may even opt to include a "Get Player" button on its own website.

Dotter notes that video programs can be optimized for one player or another just as web pages can be designed with Netscape or Microsoft Internet Explorer in mind. Not that they won't play on the "foreign" system, but there may often be quirks and questions.

"It's easy to identify bugs in html," she says. "Now you're dealing with media players, and if people can't get to play they're going to call you."

Stepping up…
"On-demand, stored video has not had a great deal of uptake," says Rich Mavrogeanes, CEO of VBrick Systems, a Connecticut-based maker of network video hardware and software, "because it lacks immediacy. It doesn't engage the audience as much as a live event does."

But as soon as you move from having one or two people at a time access your video files to trying to reach hundreds simultaneously, the practical demands change.

You may, for example, think you're in great shape with your 1.5 Megabit T-1 connection to the internet. But Ron Nydam, product manager for streaming products at Pinnacle Systems, warns it's all a matter of scale. Clear, crisp video images generally require a data transmission rate of at least 300 kilobits per second, he notes. "If you get four of five people on line at one time, at 300K each, it could tie up your whole connection," he says. "It would be more cost effective to rent space on a third party server."

Where can you find such a streaming media server? Nydam suggests starting with your current web host, asking if they support streaming themselves or have a partnership that provides the service. Ask, also, how many simultaneous feeds, at what data rates, they can provide.

Creating the program
The big questions about streaming revolve around connectivity and levels of service, largely because video production itself is so "old hat" for many churches. A church that's already capturing video on tape can digitize that video for web playback fairly easily, notes Microsoft's Caulton. "Since they're already set up for recording video, they are archiving whatever they event they want to broadcast. This results in a videotape," Caulton says. "They would then have a computer that was running Windows Media Encoder with a video capture card. Plug a tape deck into the encoder computer through the capture card."

A common entry-level video capture card is the Osprey from Viewcast, which can cost from a couple hundred dollars to about $1,000 depending on capabilities, notes Nydam.

Once the tape deck is hooked up, encoding the video is as easy as pressing "play," says Caulton, adding, "of course, it's more complicated than it sounds, because you have to decide what resolution, frame rate, and bit rate to encode at. Figuring out how to encode the content will require some expertise and trial and error."

How much computer firepower will this job take? "Amazingly, even a mainstream consumer computer is capable of encoding video these days," Caulton says. A 1 GHz or faster computer with 256 meg of RAM and a 40 Gb hard drive is plenty for basic encoding, he adds. To send a live broadcast from this computer to an off-site server requires a network connection capable of 500 to 2000 kilobits per second upstream.

Pinnacle's Nydam suggests you "purchase as powerful a CPU as your budget will allow," but also feels 128 megabytes of RAM should be plenty, because Wiindows and RealPlayer files tend to be fairly small.

Armed with these resources, Caulton suggests "simply taking videos and encoding them, then putting them up on the Web for on-demand viewing. This is very easy, very cheap to do, and will give both the church and the audience a good taste of what digital media on the web can offer."

Mavrogeanes, however, urges churches not to overlook opportunities presented by their existing infrastructure-opportunities to create and distribute video in DVD-level quality. "Offices universally, and increasingly churches, have networks," Mavrogeanes says. "There are as many Ethernet jacks installed as electric outlets."

Still, he notes, he often sees organizations that have placed standard TV monitors around their facility and plugged them in right next to a data jack. This existing Ethernet network is an opportunity, he adds. The network-equipped church ought to develop its video strategy with an eye on the future, and take full advantage of their ample bandwidth.

VBrick systems can encode video to MPEG format (Motion Picture Experts Group), an industry standard format that supports broadcast quality video distribution. MPEG, in turn, can be converted to other formats as needed.

"If you have a solution designed for live events, you can always do non-live," he says. "It doesn't work the other way."

Churches exploring internet video will find previous video experience makes a big difference. And there's lots of practical help available on the web, including extensive resources at vendors' websites.