Case Study: Bringing the Mountain to Online Viewers

Anyone who has cable TV knows that Christian broadcasting is a huge market. So it shouldn't surprise anyone to learn that Christian streaming is on its way to becoming a huge market as well.

One service provider that has staked a claim on the "ministries" market is San Diego-based Nine Systems. Among the company’s current clients in the ministries market are EMI Christian Music Group, Lakewood Church, T. D. Jakes Ministries, Crystal Cathedral, Calvary Chapel, and Shadow Mountain Ministries, to name a few. "There is a huge interest in spreading the word of God over the Internet," says Alan Haefs, Nine System's business development director.

Calling itself "a network of networks," Nine Systems provides an aggregated solution that balances, replicates, and routes customers’ content through the company's CDN and across other CDNs. "This open framework is more reliable and robust than any closed network because it removes dependency on a single network, thereby eliminating the risk of failures in the system," the company claims on its Web site. "When a user requests content, the `Networks of Networks' knows which CDN is performing most reliably and is closest to the end user and routes the request appropriately." Nine Systems claims to have seen "no network outages affecting end users" during its four years in business. The company also offers Stream OS, a suite of configurable rich media management and delivery tools that enable audio and video streaming, live event broadcasting, web conferencing, and the anytime sale of rich media content.

Haefs recently served as a presenter at the National Religious Broadcasters convention in Anaheim. He reports that sessions on streaming at the conference were SRO. Almost all the attendees were interested in Internet-based delivery, he says.

"As the Internet impacts our lives more and more, our church will be using the Internet more and more; it is important for churches to use every media available," says Jerry Harder, CTO for Nine Systems client Shadow Mountain Ministries in El Cajon, California. "We see streaming as an extension of our church. We are using technology to give our message a bigger impact. It allows us to reach out and extend the walls of our church."

Nine Systems is currently working with large organizations as well as with small, rural churches. "We work with a lot of small churches that are just getting their feet wet [in streaming]," says Pete Mountanos, Nine Systems' CTO. "Most of the ministries we work with already have the capture part covered. Most have been doing video for a while and have video equipment on hand," he says. Where they really need help is in the encoding. "That's the number one thing that needs to be addressed with most of them," he says, adding that the Nine Systems client services group will often go so far as to spec out encoding equipment for their customers. "We could do the encoding for them, but we feel it is better to teach people how to fish than to sell them fish," adds Haefs.

Most ministries start out with limited live Webcasts, usually just of their Sunday services, for the benefit of parishioners who are home bound or otherwise unable to attend, says Haefs. But ministries and churches usually quickly catch on to the advantages of on-demand.

That's certainly been the case with Shadow Mountain Ministries. Its CTO Harder explains that their original intent was merely to broadcast the Sunday sermons of their popular preacher Dr. David Jeremiah. But it quickly became apparent that on-demand offered something that live Webcasting doesn't, something Harder calls "the convenience factor."

With VOD, Shadow Mountain's many missionaries, who are scattered around the world in different time zones, can now conveniently access Dr. Jeremiah's sermons. But even the locals are taking advantage of VOD access—the leaders of Bible studies groups can now coordinate their lessons with Jeremiah's Sunday sermon, for example. In fact, according to Harder, "In the last three months, VOD access has doubled every month."