[Editor’s Note: This is part 3 of a 4 part series: Podcasting Sermons]
With the sermons all nicely edited, it’s time to upload to a hosting server somewhere and get them on a website!
There are several ways you can put sermons onto the web. These range from ‘all in one’ services that do everything for you, to doing everything yourself.
We’ll look at the different options so you can see what would best suit you needs.
All In One
Probably the easiest way to put the sermons online and create a podcast is to use an ‘all in one service’ which does everything for you (hosting the sermons, having an online audio player and a page where the sermons are listed).
In my opinion, the best all in one service is Buzzsprout. It’s very simple to use. With the free option you can upload up to two hours of audio a month (so four 30 min sermons!) and ‘episodes’ (a sermon) are kept for 90 days. Pay for accounts start at $9 a month where you can upload four hours a month and the episodes are kept forever.
With Buzzsprout you get your own ‘mini site’ and some very nice players you can embed into your Church site. Buzzsprout is not ‘overtly’ Christian, but the company is owned by Christians and was originally created to help Churches put sermons online!
Another ‘church only’ option is Sermondrop, but I think Buzzsprout is a better all round service.
Both of these services take care of the hosting of the Sermons (you upload the MP3 into their site/hosting), give you a player to put on your site and also make the podcast feed (more on those later!) and makes it iTunes friendly, etc.
Manually
If you’d prefer to do things yourself, here are some other ways:
First, you’ll need to put your MP3 somewhere online so people can listen and download it.
The easiest place to put your MP3 files is on the same space/package/server where you host your Church website (normally uploading them by FTP). But unless you have a very big hosting package with lots of space and bandwidth allowances, you might find that you could quickly use this up!
You can upgrade your hosting package (which might cost!) or there’s a special type of hosting offered by Amazon that can be excellent value for hosting media files (like MP3s).
The service is known as ‘Amazon Simple Storage Service’ (Amazon S3).
Rather than having a ‘lump sum’ price, with S3 you pay for what you use (a combination of storage, bandwidth and requests for the files). This can often work out much cheaper than ‘normal’ hosting. (I use S3 for hosting the sermons for my Church. There’s several GBs of sermons on there and it costs about $1 a month!) This is a very good article explaining how S3 can be used for media hosting.
As the article says, uploading items to S3 is done differently than using FTP. The S3Fox Firefox addon is excellent for doing the job. There are also some programs that you install on your computer that can also easily upload files to S3, such as Cloudberry Explorer (Windows) and 3Hub (Mac). Also on Mac, the popular FTP client Transmit can also upload to S3.
When you upload a file to S3 you can either have a long ‘bucket’ (folder) and file name such as:
http://media.yourchurchsite.com.s3.amazonaws.com/sermon_01.mp3
Or if you (or your hosting company) can manage your domain name settings, you can tie your bucket to the domain so the address would be:
http://media.yourchurchsite.com/sermon_01.mp3
It’s not as complicated as it sounds (honest)!
So, now you’ve got your sermons online and ready to use, but you’ve got to make them available for people to listen to!
Manually Displaying the Sermons
Now you’ve uploaded the files you need to display them! There are a number of web sites/services that can help you do this.
Blogger
Blogger, owned and run by Google, is designed as an easy to use’ blogging’ service, but can also do podcasting.
Here’s another good blogger podcasting tutorial (it’s a little old but still good!).
With Blogger you can either use a ‘blogspot’ account (provided by blogger) to display the sermons, or you can edit the template and publish it to your own site/hosting.
WordPress
WordPress is another popular option for bloggers/podcasters and is what ChurchM.ag uses! It comes in two flavours, a ‘hosted’ WordPress installation where you get a http://yoursite.wordpress.com url or you can download the wordpress software and install/run it on your own hosting. WordPress can do more than just blogging/podcasting and can be used to run a whole site very easily.
There are several good sites offering free wordpress themes such as WordPress’s own Theme Directory (with the ‘hosted’ option there are a limited number of themes), iThemes and of course 8BIT creates it’s own themes like the Standard Theme! You can also get custom themes from web designers who love WordPress – like me!
In WordPress you can use ‘plugins’ to allow you to do extra things. These are the best podcasting plugins:
PowerPress is widely used among podcasters and is good for general podcasting with WordPress. It includes a choice of customisable players and iTunes feed support (more on that later). I think it’s best to have a category called ‘Sermons’ and put each sermon as a post within the category.
Sermon Browser is designed for podcasting Sermons by Mark Barnes, a Church Minister from Wales (UK). This is a plugin that really takes the work out of Podcasting sermons with WordPress. You can add your Service Times, Preachers/Speakers and Sermon Series within the plugin settings, so adding a new sermon is a breeze. It also features very customisable templates for how the sermons are displayed and there’s a player. The sermons can also be filtered by users using a number of choices (such as date, preacher, series, book of the Bible, etc.).
You can also Do It Yourself using WordPress!
Another way of podcasting with WordPress, which is more ‘techy’ (and geeky!) and how I run the sermon podcast at my Church, is to set it up for yourself!
I did this way as when I started there weren’t nice plugins like Powerpress or Sermon Browser to help you! (I would now use PowerPress or Sermon Browser to podcast using WordPress). But if you’re looking for an easy and very ‘full featured’ way of podcasting sermons on WordPress, I thoroughly recommend PowerPress or Sermon Browser.
Yahoo Media Player
If you don’t want to use something like Blogger or WordPress, or maybe you’ve already got a list of sermons on your site which you wish to have a player and perhaps turn into a podcast, there is another way!
Yahoo Media Player is a very simple way to turn a list of links to MP3 files into players on your site. All you have to do is add one line of code to your page:
[cc lang=”html”]<script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://webplayer.yahooapis.com/player.js”></script>[/cc]
It then turns any links on that page to a MP3 file into a mini player! (It’s also possible to change the colour, etc, of the Yahoo Media player if you don’t mind playing with some html and javascript.
So we’ve got our sermons online and displaying nicely in Buzzspout, WordPress, Blogger or on another type of site! But we want this to be a full blown podcast and that needs one crucial thing, a podcast ‘feed’ and that’s what we’ll be looking at in the final part of the series.
Laura says
Wow, excellent post and very useful information for streaming sermons online.Thanks for all the research. Wanted to pass on another tool for hosting and streaming your sermons online. Sermon Connect provides a clean interface that allows for unlimited storage of mp3 and other media files. This can be integrated into any website. Other features include, sharing on social media, live streaming, sync with iTunes and other RSS feeds. It’s a snazzy way to post and organize sermons and series that allows the listener to find what they are looking for easily. Just another option…
James Cooper says
I’m glad you found it useful Laura. Sermon Connect looks interesting, but I always find it off putting when there’s no price on a site… 😉
Laura says
Awww, yes. I agree with you. The prices are actually listed…there are 3 different versions. Found here: http://www.faithhighway.com/getting-started-with-video-sermons-and-audio-sermons.php
Sermon Flow ($695): http://fhredesign2.fhview.com/images/Image/user/Sermonflow-MediaSuite-20110613.pdf
Plug In ($395)- http://fhredesign2.fhview.com/images/Image/user/Sermonflow-PlugIn-20110613.pdf
Sermon FlowSocial($995) http://fhredesign2.fhview.com/images/Image/user/Sermonflow-MediaSuiteSocial-20110613.pdf
Hope the helps you.
James Cooper says
Thanks for those Laura, shame the prices aren’t hidden in the pdfs! Those services have some hefty features (like streaming) in them that the likes of sermondrop and buzzspout don’t – thus the much bigger prices!
keith says
Actually we have faith highways sermon connect and it is TRULY AWFUL!
Lets start with – the thing is still broken and no one can share sermons on facebook… When you click “share” it just says media. No simple linking direct to the sermon… so forget about anyone easily sharing a sermon they liked. AWFUL.
Also… navigating the picture format seems like a good idea – until you try it on a slower computer or phone.
Sherif says
Nice article! The way I did it was to upload all the sermons in MP3 format to a specified directory. I then wrote a PHP script that scans the directory and generates a podcast RSS feed that is iTunes compatible. You can give iTunes this feed.
This script scans each MP3 and automatically reads the Song name, title etc… and puts that in the feed details.
Hope this helps others: http://bitbucket.org/sherif/podcast-generator/
James Cooper says
Thanks for sharing Sherif. That’s a really cool tool!
devan says
sermon.net works great for our ministry too!!!
James Cooper says
That’s great Devan. I nearly included http://sermon.net in the article but didn’t want to give people too many confusing options! So have a comment mentioning it is great 🙂
Neil says
I agree about Sermon.net. It’s pretty simple. The Straight-to-Internet recording option was pretty neat.
Jason Minton says
I built my churches video/audio podcast framework in the Drupal CMS. We use blip.tv to host the audio and video. We use feedburner to feed iTunes. We use RSSGraffitti to feed facebook.
You can see our podcast page here: http://friendshipcommunitychurch.org/podcast
Also, her is a tutorial on how we produce our podcast each week:
http://friendshipcommunitychurch.org/tutorials/podcast-production-how-to
Our podcast is online available to watch or download usually within about 5 hours following our Sunday morning service (so around 5-6pm Sunday).
I’m happy to answer any questions via twitter: @jasonsbytes
James Cooper says
Thanks Jason, I keep hearing good things about blip.tv!
John says
Sermon.net works for our small church. Thanks for all the recent sermon podcasting info.
Stay blessed…john
Karen O'Neal says
I really like Sermon Browser when using WordPress – but another option is to use Podcast Generator (Open Source Podcast Publishing Solution). It is a very simple product to set up and use. I’ve used a WordPress plugin (Simple Feed List) to easily link to it for those who want to have their church site on WordPress but still use the Podcast Generator. It would be great if someone could create a WordPress plugin for the Podcast Generator so it wasn’t separate from WordPress.
Megan Harney says
Thank you for the article! Can you use the plugins for the WordPress sites on the “hosted” version of WordPress (WordPress.com) or can they only be used with the self-hosted version (WordPress.org)?
Thanks for your time!
James Cooper says
Hi Megan,
Plugins only work with self-hosted versions of WordPress. Here’s in the info about the (very very limited) plugins on WordPress.com sites: http://en.support.wordpress.com/plugins/
Tricia says
Thanks for the article. My church is looking to make the switch from podcasting through our website’s built in media players to a third-party (so that if we switch websites, all our sermons are still in one place). I have now come across buzzsprout in two church media blogs talking about it, but just initially looking at it, I noticed there wasn’t a way to attach documents, such as the sermon notes or a place in the categories to write the scripture reference, preferably with a way to link the verse to biblegateway or another online bible. Are those features available and I just didn’t see them? Also, I didn’t like how buzzsprout says “artist” instead of speaker. Are the category names like that editable?
James Cooper says
Hi Tricia,
For questions about Buzzsprout, I’m afraid I can’t help! You can email them direct on: [email protected]
Another option, to keep all the files in one place no matter where you move, then using Amazon S3 hosting could be a good solution.
Jami says
There is one BIG problem with hosting media files on AWS S3 –
S3 is designed as ‘simple storage’ so it does not come with bandwidth monitoring tools. Anyone running a possible high demand server needs these tools in order to monitor, throttle and control bandwidth usage.
Should your media files take a big hit (DDoS attack) AWS will just happily charge your credit card on file for the bandwidth spike. Your option with S3 is to set an alarm to email you when your monthly fees have reached a limit you have set, this will not stop your S3 server nor the charges.
To stop the bleeding of your CC you’ll need to go into your S3 console and deny access to your bucket (media files). So now your no longer streaming your audio. Your sermons are off line, until you feel it’s safe again and reverse the process. With S3 it’s all great until it’s not – because you do not have to tools to watch the bandwidth and deny access to just the problem areas.
ASW does offer the more costly option of EC2, which does have the tools for the server admin to keep an eye on things. This is what EC2 is designed for ‘Hosting files, not Simple Storage’. With options and tools one can stop the bleed of fees by just shutting down critical areas and not the whole show.
There is just a bit more to this subject of serving up media files in a cost affective way. S3 is not a complete solution, but a good place to start if you have very little traffic and/or very few media files.
But when using S3 watch your fees closely, and know the pros and cons of the server you’ve chosen. . . .
Blessings all ~
James Cooper says
Thanks Jami. As you say – always wise to find out about things before you start using them! But S3 has always worked well for me 🙂
Eric Dye says
Great point, Jami. I think you’re right. A great place to start, but this can be a huge drawback. Thank you!