Video of Sermons

[James Nored]

One of the things that we are seeking to add to our website at High Pointe is videos of our sermons in high quality or high def. This would take up too much space on our hosting server. So we are looking at either doing this ourselves or storing these with a third party. One of our members, Kyle Johnson, is checking on this.

Does anyone have any suggestions for this or experience in this area?

[Kevin Brockus]

I think videos of sermons is a must have for our website. It is a great way to reach those who cannot attend service for whatever reason. With that being said, since we do not have a full time IT staff to maintain the resources necessary to successfully pull this off in-house, I agree with Kyle about hosting the streaming video with a third party company. The link for the video would be on our website and the user would not know the video is coming from somewhere else. Donn, Kyle or myself could all train the staff to create and publish the videos. Audio format would be a good idea too as some people like to listen in their car or on an iPod.

Kevin Brockus

[James Nored]

Kevin, you might check with Kyle and see if he needs any help with this.

We do have podcasting and audio files on our website.

[James Nored]

Kyle Johnson is working on a third party host server for our videos. If we can get hi def video podcasting smoothly, then we can take off with this. I had lunch with Stan Sherwood on Sunday, and we talked about the video issue a bit. I asked him to check into getting us up and going with the necessary cameras and the like. Apparently, our system can handle up to seven cameras! And Donn Holsinger apparently ran a video system for a previous church.

If we can really get these videos out through streaming or video podcasting at a high quality, then this can be used as a good outreach tool. If we cannot get it in high quality on the web, then it would not be worth the cost to just have better videos for us.

When I see a high quality video on a church's site, it tells me that: 1) this church is current on this; 2) they probably are current on real life and spiritual issues too; and 3) they are wanting me to check them out, and this gives me an opportunity to do so.

Video podcasting is starting to grow in popularity. In fact, I am looking at doing some video "blogging."

What are your thoughts?