Streaming providers

[pcre]

As someone who is relatively new to the world of streaming church services, I'm wondering what you look for in a streaming provider. The company I'm working for provides streaming services, and there is talk of branching out to houses of worship, etc. I'm just curious what unique challenges you face, and what is missing from the providers that are already out there.

I'm deliberately omitting the company name... I don't want to come off as selling something.

[churchtech007]

Having just gone through this process it came down to two things.

1. Unlimited, free, helpful tech support
2. Unlimited free trial. (It took us almost 2 months to get the quality we expected, and as long as we didn't advertise our service they let us try it until we were satisfied)

Jonathan

oh yeah, we're a church, PRICE!

[jonack]

We have been using a service and generally like it.

-It lets us have DVR functionality so our satellite campus can be running step in step with us, or on a delay.
-We also have the option to archive the stream to an MP4 so that we can keep it for archival purposes.
-Sunday morning tech support is super important because that's when church's will need the most support!
-Streaming in HD is a must, but the ability to have the viewer select an SD or HD stream is also important

Our challenge was that our internet connection had to be upgraded. It would be nice for our streaming host to have contacted and worked out the issues directly instead of making us the middle men when they were speaking telcom language that even us techies didn't understand.

Hope that random smattering of ideas helps in some way...

[wmmsaved]

1. Cutdown capability. We want to be able to webcast an entire service live and then be able to make available a cut down copy of just the sermon so that our pastor can link to it or embed it in his blog and on the church website. To be able to go to the provider's site and, with a few short key/mouse clicks, quickly create an additional video that contains only the sermon is a real plus. Some providers have this feature others don't.

2. Channels. We had great response when, on a previous service that provided "channels," we could load previous recordings. You could watch individual recordings on demand or just sit and watch the channel as it played programs we had loaded in a strategic order. According to the stats, some folks watched for hours.

3. Viewer information. What do they watch, how many times, what time of day, how long and where are they?

4. Great quality. Enough said

5. Easy access overseas. We have a lot of service personnel in our church and they say our present provider, our 3rd (located in Europe) is easily accessible wherever they are and that the first 2 (located in the U.S.) were not.

Hope this helps,
Michael

[pcre]

Thanks for the feedback everyone... As my employer keeps working on this service offering, these tips will be a huge help!