Creative Scribble

About a year ago (at another church in Knoxville), I conducted a survey asking members of the church what they liked and didn't like about their current website. The number one dislike was that videos (not just audio) of the messages were not available online. So, I did some research and found out some interesting things...

First off, I thought it was important to note that nearly every church that's effectively reaching the target demographic that OneLife is aiming to reach puts a big emphasis on making videos of every service/series available online. Many also stream their services live on Sundays.

Secondly, I discovered that most companies offering on-demand streaming were REALLY expensive...almost $5000/year on average.

Thirdly, most start-up churches don't have $5K a year to spend!

...

So, after this interesting bit of research I decided to get creative and find a cheaper alternative. Thanks to LifePoint Church in Wilmington, NC, I discovered Vimeo.com. Essentially, Vimeo is just another YouTube, but it's a lot cleaner and they offer a Pro account for only $60 a year which offers all the space we'd ever need to upload messages each week. Compared to $5K a year it's almost a no-brainer! Plus, it's great quality!

While on the money-saving kick, it seemed fitting to look into cheaper live streaming alternatives as well. I actually owe Rodney for the tip on this one (but he owes NewSpring Church, so whatever...), but we discovered Mogulus. It's a site that allows you to broadcast your own "channel" for free! There are some people on Mogulus who actually broadcast themselves all-day long! We won't go to that extreme, but starting out we will be broadcasting our services live on Sundays via mogulus.com/onelifechurch. It does have a few ads that slide up every once in a while, but compared to most streaming services that our anywhere from $2,000 to $6,000 a year, we can deal with a few ads!

There you have it...Video On-demand On-a-budget.

- Tyler