“Content is king.” Bill Gates coined this phrase at the dawn of the internet, and it’s still relevant today, especially in the church. After all, the church’s content is the gospel. What could be more “king” than that?
Sermons, small-group studies, mid-week services—this is the content your church uses to share the gospel. This is the content that’s impacting your members, discipling them and helping them grow deeper spiritually.
Recording this content and making it easily accessible online has become necessary for churches as the world becomes more and more digitally centered. Where and how you distribute this content is now something churches need to start thinking seriously about.
For the last few years, a common hub for churches to store and publish their messages has been Vimeo. Vimeo provides a good hang out spot for video, but is it getting your church’s message out as far as it can go?
If you consider content sharing as a pie graph, Vimeo is about 10% of that pie. With 170 million viewers worldwide and 44 million in the U.S., it has a wide reach, but it can only reach who it can reach: Vimeo watchers.
When it comes to sharing church content as wide and as far as it can possibly go, you have to go after the other 90% of the pie.
Americans and Christians worldwide consume content via multiple mediums, so the church, if it wants to reach the most amount of people possible, must enter into all of those mediums.
Take set-top boxes as an example. The overall demand for set-top boxes was up 32% in 2015. On Amazon’s latest Prime Day—the equivalent to Black Friday for Prime customers—the Amazon Fire stick was the company’s best-selling item. Apple TV has sold 37 million units since it launched, with Roku following close behind at 20 million box and streaming sticks shipped.
YouTube is another medium churches can’t afford to forget about. The video-sharing site has over one billion viewers worldwide, which is almost one-third of all people on the internet.
Vimeo is good for storing video that can be shared one way, but if you want to store video that can be shared in all of the places people like to consume video today, you’re going to have to go beyond Vimeo and distribute to multiple platforms.
I know what you are thinking. Do you know the complexity of managing all of those platforms? Do you know that I am already wearing multiple hats and barely keeping up? Are you increasing my workload?
The good news is there are platforms available that take the workload off of your back and automate the management for it. One of my favorites is MediaFusion because they have spent extra time building a system that’s easy to use, so any volunteer from any background can operate it.
MediaFusion also will come alongside your existing workflow, instead of interrupting it. Meaning, you don’t have to toss out Vimeo altogether. Vimeo can remain a part of your digital strategy, but with MediaFusion, you don’t have to feel limited by it anymore.
MediaFusion is a media platform that houses content in one place and then distributes it to multiple locations—YouTube, set top boxes, as well as live web media players and is the trusted content distribution and management solution for Catalyst and Hillsong.
To start a free trial, visit MediaFusion at MediaFusion.Church or call them at 877.878.4007. If you sign up with MediaFusion before the end of August, you will receive a free branded app for Amazon Fire TV, a $750 value.
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