Calvary Chapel - Imagine Communications

Calvary Chapel
Calvary Chapel Reaches out to Thousands of
Worshippers with SelenioFlexTM Encoders
By Jack Chew, Video Operations Manager,
Calvary Chapel Fort Lauderdale
Calvary Chapel Fort Lauderdale (CCFL) was founded by Senior
Pastor Bob Coy in 1985. We are a non-denominational megachurch
with a congregation of over 30,000, including up to 14,000
viewers of our live stream. Calvary Chapel also has an accredited
elementary-through-secondary school on its 75-acre property.
Currently, Calvary Chapel and the school employ roughly 1000
staff members and hundreds of volunteers. We have expanded into
adjacent cities and now have seven additional alternate venues (or
satellite campuses). Calvary Chapel was ranked among the top 10
largest churches in the United States by Forbes in 2009.
As Video Operations Manager, I oversee all of the video needs for all
campuses, from line producing our multi-camera services seven
times a week, to acquiring and implementing technology to be used
over our dark fiber network to the satellite campuses. I’m also
responsible for the recording and distribution of our services — both
on physical media and streamed live via our SelenioFlex™ encoders
from Imagine Communications — and forecasting the future trends
in technology so Calvary Chapel can best benefit from new advances.
Meeting High Standards
After much research, I was convinced that SelenioFlex could provide
the robust, fully integrated system we needed to ensure that we
would never (and I do mean never) have a system failure. From our
initial installation almost four years ago, these live-to-file ingest
encoders have never failed, in spite of the fact that they have been
running almost continuously every day of the week. I challenge
anyone to find a PC that can do that!
When we decided to go with SelenioFlex, we also wanted to build a
streaming profile that would be sensitive to our older audiences that
may not have the most up-to-date viewing hardware or high-speed
Internet connectivity. The H.264 (AVC) encoding on these systems
is STUNNING. It delivers great quality, great profile control, great
reliability and greater flexibility in terms of playback compatibility.
To this day, I receive calls from other churches and people asking,
“How do you get your video to look so good?”
Customer
▪
Calvary Chapel Fort Lauderdale
Industry
▪
House of Worship
Business Challenge
▪
Quickly, efficiently and easily encoding church
services for high-quality live streaming to
audiences of up to 14,000 and on-demand
availability.
Technology Solution
▪
SelenioFlexTM encoders
Business Value
▪
“Now we [stream to] 10,000 to 14,000 viewers who
have donated hundreds of thousands of dollars
because their experience was exceptional.”
▪
“Our overhead is greatly reduced, in that I don’t
need to have an expensive technician on staff.”
▪
“The Imagine Communications H.264 (AVC)
encoding is STUNNING. It delivers great quality,
great profile control, great reliability and greater
flexibility in terms of playback compatibility.”
▪
“To this day, I receive calls from other churches
and people asking, ‘how do you get your video
to look so good?’”
We have a high-availability policy at CCFL — we
endeavor to ensure that everyone who wants to
see and hear our content can do so. We established
a tech support line just to make sure the viewers can
“lock on” with us and access our streams. The funny
thing about this is that we have never had a call
about anything that was a result of the SelenioFlex
encoders. The systems never stop working.
The flexibility of the Imagine Communications
systems and software allows us to keep up with the
ever-changing web landscape — they are staying
ahead of the encoding curve. That takes a lot of
weight off of my shoulders.
Achieving Seamless Integration
Growing the Audience
Our SelenioFlex encoders are fully integrated
within our video production infrastructure. Filebased media assets are transcoded using the
Imagine Communications systems from their initial
XDCam format to AVC for on-demand viewing.
For real-time streaming, SelenioFlex encodes
HD-SDI input sources with embedded audio into
four AVC output streams ranging from 56 Kb/s to 4
Mb/s to support a broad range of viewing devices
and viewer network connectivity. SelenioFlex
also automatically segments the outputs for
compatibility with the most popular mobile phones
and tablets.
Our ministry comprises freelancers and volunteers.
Many of them have very little experience in the
video field, much less in the live streaming world.
The software interface of the SelenioFlex systems
allows me to have even the least-trained person
quickly up to speed and operating our transcoding
jobs for on-demand content. I can have almost
anyone in the operator’s chair, knowing SelenioFlex
will do all of the heavy lifting. Our overhead is
greatly reduced, in that I don’t need to have an
expensive technician on staff, just willing and alert
people who care to do a good job.
When we first started streaming video for our
live services, we had an audience of roughly 800
people a week. That was seven years ago. Now we
host 14,000 viewers who have donated hundreds
of thousands of dollars because their experience
was exceptional.
Prior to the purchase of the SelenioFlex systems,
it was taking two to three days for us to post our
archived sermons to our internal server. Back then
there were a few hundred people each week that
would wait patiently for us to finally post the file. Now we
are able to do this in the same afternoon — often
in real time — and we are serving up our archive
file to 3,000 to 5,000 people each week. This saves
me anywhere from 10 to 16 man-hours per week.
I have been able to actualize that savings to help
offset the cost of a third Imagine Communications
encoder to support multi-language translations
and closed captioning.
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© 2014 Imagine Communications
Proprietary and Confidential
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