Tyler`s reporT Card

S
tonegate Fellowship, Midland,
TX, was founded in 1999 as a
church plant from First Baptist
Church (also in Midland).
We started as a portable
church, but quickly outgrew
the junior high school we
were worshipping in, which led us to build a
permanent campus in 2003, that currently runs
four services weekly.
About a year ago, we decided to launch our
first multisite campus in Odessa, as roughly
500-600 congregants from Odessa where
making the drive to Stonegate every week
for worship. Midland and Odessa are unique
in that they’re both two decent sized cities
(approx. 150,000 population), roughly ten miles
apart, in the heart of West Texas. We felt that
opening a second location in Odessa would not
only facilitate worship for current attendees,
but also allow us to better minister to the
city of Odessa. We have been meeting at the
Junior High School in Odessa since September
of 2014.
When we first launched the campus, we were
recording our 9:00 am service in Midland and
driving it to Odessa for their 11:00 am service.
However, we knew we wanted to run a live stream, and
started researching. Our team is not as experienced as
some other facilities in video systems so we knew we were
going to need to find a solution that could help us with the
technical aspects.
We contacted our A/V designers Skylark to ask about
a solution and they pointed us to DigitalGlue, a company
that provides equipment, integration, and software
development for the production and distribution of digital
video.
The team at DigitalGlue worked with us to provide the
streaming service that we needed in the most timely and
cost-effective way they could. Although we had been
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by Tyler Dodds
of the streamed video was just as sharp as the hard drive
recorded service we had been presenting, and made the
decision to follow their recommendation. DigitalGlue was
able to configure all our equipment for us in their shop
before we even received it, and worked closely with the
school board’s IT department to navigate the feed through
the firewalls they had in place. We really only needed to
add the gear to our racks when it came in and turn it on.
We use the Ellipse 3100 series encoder and the
Harmonic ProView 8130 integrated receiver decoder with
IP input and HD decode. The Ellipse receives the camera
feeds and encodes them into
MPEG 4 AVC HD video, which is
sent to our Odessa campus over
the open internet, and the ProView
decodes the video and outputs it to
SDI for projection to the audience.
The VideoFlow Fortress DVP system
e
Ease of Us
helps guard the transmission from
Flexibility
packet loss and jitter.
The Ellipse also runs at a 4.2.2.
Stability
compression, so there hasn’t been any
Price
lue
degradation in the video quality from
Overall Va
the hard drive to streaming system.
Another great aspect of the IP solution
DigitalGlue set-up for us is that we can stream in any
direction. This is not only for our Odessa campus back to
Midland but to any future campuses. Our teaching pastors
can teach from any campus and send it back to the other
campuses and all we have to do is float around 1 encoder
which saves us money. This means that our team is not only
able to communicate God’s Word clearly and provide that
live-element that our attendees crave, but we are able to
connect our congregations via the streaming messages. We
want to make sure that our Odessa and future campuses
feel validated and included in the Stonegate family, so
having the ability to stream in both directions allows
our congregants to see that we’re all one, and that each
campus is equal to the other.
We’ve recently purchased a night club that will be
renovated and become Odessa’s permanent campus.
Our current internet service is 20/20 (20mbs down and
20 mbs up) and the encoder is set to send around 10 mbs
per second, so that our video quality is impressive. When
we first started, we tested at 5 mbs per second, and the
image quality was good, but moving up to the 10mbs
really captured the quality we wanted. Because we will be
using a dedicated internet service at each campus, there’s
no other potential traffic that can cause the video signal
to be interrupted, and since we’re only using a relatively
small compressed stream, our costs
have been very manageable. We’ve
realized that we want to keep our
facilities smaller, and don’t want to
have a venue that seats more than
1300 - we’d rather have multiple
DigitalGlue
smaller venues to keep the contact
4/5
with our congregants more personal.
5/5
We realized it’s more affordable for
us to launch smaller campuses as we
5/5
grow than it would cost to build one
3/5
large, centralized, facility.
4/5
I mentioned earlier that we
don’t have highly qualified video
engineers, so one of the things that gave us a lot of
comfort with DigitalGlue is their commitment to customer
support. Any time we’ve called them, they’ve been very
prompt with helping us out and getting our issues resolved,
which provides tremendous piece-of-mind knowing we
don’t need to figure this out ourselves.
In our opinion, choosing DigitalGlue was the best way
to go for our church. The solution and products they
mentioned were cost-efficient and gave us the complete
control over our stream that we were looking for, without
losing any of the quality we had anticipated moving from a
recorded drive. We would recommend them to everyone.
Tyler's ard
Report C
Photo courtesy of Stonegate Fellowship
looking at doing satellite transmission to Odessa and other
future campuses, DigitalGlue recommended that public
IP-streaming would work just as well for us and provide
us with other options in the future. They recommended
Harmonic encoding/decoding equipment and VideoFlow’s
Digital Video Protection (DVP) solution.
We initially were nervous about running a public IPstreamed video service due to bad assumptions we had
about reliability. DigitalGlue set-up their own demo system
and let us use it for a couple of weeks so we could make
a decision. Once we got the equipment setup we ran the
stream for several hours on several different days and it
worked without a hitch. We quickly realized that the quality
February 2016
February 2016
Tyler Dodds is the Pastor of Worship Arts at Stonegate
Fellowship stonegatefellowship.com. Follow him on twitter
and Instagram @tylerdodds
twitter.com/tfwm
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Review
Stonegate Fellowship Streams with the
Help of DigitalGlue