While we may not be reaching much internationally we are reaching across the nation after only 3 weeks of being publicly announced. We do have some that join us from Sweden, United Kingdom, Japan and China the majority of our attendance are from all across the US. Many of these people have not been to church in 5-15 years, usually because they had a bad experience, felt unwanted, etc. Whatever the reason, experiencing church online from the comfort of their home opens a lot of doors. It allows people to be very open while not having to feel judged by others.
Other churches think that it’s expensive and out of reach, when really any church can do it no matter what their budget. Thanks to ChurchOnline.org a platform that was developed by LifeChurch.tv and will be released publicly soon.
If you haven’t experienced church online for yourself I’d strongly recommend doing so! Join us Sundays 11am & 6pm EST.
First let me apologize for not being on schedule and getting this post up on Monday, but at least I’m still meeting my goal with blogging once a week posting.
Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been forced to re-evaluate how we host our online video. Due to changes in the billing of our current service provider Ooyala, I’m having to rethink my strategy. They use to bill per hour watched, they have changed to bill per gigabyte delivered. I am by no way upset by this, because all other companies are already billing this way and Ooyala has worked with us to try and keep us at the same pricing. However, just due to the fact that we record HD video even our little 3 minute clips are over 100mb.
Anyways, we are changing our strategy to only hosting our sermons on Ooyala and posting our short clips on Vimeo. The only thing I don’t like about Vimeo is that your username can’t start with a number… so obviously “12Stone” can’t be our username… We can pay only $60/year and get unlimited hosting for our HD video. Vimeo is also a little more socially friendly as people can share it directly, even download the video if we let them. There are ofcourse some limits:
It’s been a couple of months since we started to use Ooyala at 12Stone Church as our video hosting service and I’m very impressed. Since starting this new service it is easier than ever to upload and post content online. I have the ability to add multiple users and give them different roles so that I can allow the video guys to upload their own content, the director of communications can login and see the analytics without touching the videos, and I can rename, tag, organize, and make new channels.
Screen capture of Ooyala Analytics
In the analytics section we are able to see total displays, total plays, unique plays, the percentage of the video that was watched, we can see if there are any big dips where people lost interest in the video, etc. It really helps to nail down the mystery of what people think about all of our content.
Screen capture of Ooyala External Publishing
A great feature I found is the external publishing capabilities. This allows me to connect our Ooyala account to our YouTube account, Google Video Sitemap, Yahoo! Video Search, and any other MRSS (Media RSS) feeds that I want. For example, we uploaded Darin and Alex to Ooyala and by adding a label to it Ooyala automatically posted the video to our YouTube account. There is also advanced analytics on the media that you publish externally.
Now that I have your attention, let me explain. I’ve seen quite a few churches including 12Stone use YouTube as a means to host their video online and share it across the social networks, visitors and members alike. If your church is like any other hip up-to-date church then they probably have the Sunday morning sermons on video and online somewhere, hopefully not YouTube.
Have you ever seen a Christian video on YouTube? I’m sure you have, that’s no big deal but what about the so called “related” videos on the side bar? All too often I have seen where an inappropriate video shows up as the first or second related video. For example, this is a video that 12Stone did called “It’s Magic” and in the related videos the first one that shows up for me is “Trouble makers at 12Stone. (:” now this isn’t as bad as two girls making out on a bed but it’s still not something that we would have put up for everyone to associate us with. Point being, we have no control over what is associated with us on YouTube.
Now I’m not suggesting not to use YouTube all together, but instead of having it as your primary video source for visitors and members, you should have your own controlled video page. Use YouTube for the social networks and to draw more people in to see the message but direct all people from YouTube to your video page for more.
Our next step here at 12Stone is to publish only a certain amount or genre of video to YouTube while having links back to our controlled and branded video page where we have all our content. For this it would work best if you had a third party service to host and track your videos. I’ve done some research over the past couple of months in looking for a service that best suits our needs and we ended up going with Ooyala.
