Churches like Riverside, Calif.-based, Harvest Christian Fellowship (HCF) are always on the lookout for new ways to reach attendees and video has become a popular tool for its ability to extend ministry to audiences who can’t always attend services in-person due to illness, travel, or other reasons. With attendees spread throughout the US, Canada, New Zealand and Australia, HCF produces and delivers a wide range of Christian content for live and on-demand viewing. Its programming spans services, Bible studies, special events and more. To deliver such a large volume of content, HCF has teamed with Amazon Web Services (AWS) provider Stream Monkey to build a video-streaming infrastructure powered by cloud and appliance-based technology from AWS.
HCF’s leaders say they needed a more reliable, scalable and manageable video infrastructure that could support eight to nine weekly sermon and Bible study streams, as well as coverage of annual outreach events like Harvest America, a three-day multi-church event that attracts more than 200,000 online visitors.
“The Harvest Christian Fellowship goal is to make our ministry more accessible to congregants. We want them to be able to turn on a device and access a high-quality video stream of our programming from virtually anywhere just as they would with a popular film, TV show or viral video,” shares HCF Director of Marketing & Communications, Josh Morris. “AWS live and on-demand video streaming services and appliances have helped us achieve our goals, and with minimal technical knowledge and staff overhead to boot.”
HCF’s infrastructure includes AWS Elemental Live on-premise encoders that convert MP4 content to HLS (HTTP Live Streaming) with bitrates to accommodate multi-screen devices and delivery to Amazon S3 and a third-party CDN for resilient and scalable streaming worldwide. The encoders are also used to convert live streams to video-on-demand (VOD) content and to RTMP for distribution to social channels including YouTube, Facebook Live, and Twitter. Amazon S3 and Amazon S3 Glacier power on-demand playback and archival.
Morris explains how AWS Elemental products and services have been game changing for the church’s ministry offerings, “Having access to the dynamic scalability and reliability of the AWS cloud, along with the flexibility of AWS Elemental appliances, allows us to quickly and easily deploy an entire video workflow while ensuring a quality viewing experience for our congregants. We’ve also found the flexibility of pay-as-you-go pricing a boon to innovation. We’re able to find new ways to reach a new class of connected congregants and focus on spreading our message.”
