Just saw this article about the technology that Christ Fellowship Church (Palm Beach Gardens, FL) is using to broadcast to their multiple sites. Geoff and I will be there in March for one of our multi-site church leadership community gatherings and will look forward to checking it out in person. What other technology solutions are you using, wish you were using or wish you were not using? :-)
The encoding methodology used is pretty great for standard definition video (what nearly all churches - including megachurches) can afford. The trick will be the long term ramifications of uncompressed (or low compression) HD, since the whole point of HD is to maintain stellar picture quality.
Perhaps more important than the question of the technology used is the discussion of the complex logistics required to have interactive services sharing vocals, band, video, click tracks and the rest in a seamless environment. Very aggressive of Christ Fellowship Church. I'll be looking into this and contacting them to learn how they're allowing for the Holy Spirit to move in the midst of such serious programming (way cool topic!).
Thanks for the link!
Posted by: Anthony D. Coppedge | February 21, 2006 at 01:54 AM
Two other churches doing sychronized worship are Northland - A Church Distributed in Orlando, Florida and Celebration Church in Jacksonville, Florida. (Seems to be a Florida thing)
The common thread is Neil Morrison who worked with all three churches. You can reach Neil at www.mediavisions.com.
Posted by: Geoff Surratt | February 21, 2006 at 09:50 AM
We have been using the streambox technology for over a year now to deliver video teaching to another campus about 3 miles away. We are using 2 T-1 Lines to keep the data rate a bit higher and quality as well. It is not a multiple direction service though... just a video venue, but the StreamBox has been great... a rock solid performer.
Posted by: Blair Farley | April 03, 2006 at 03:53 AM