Churches use media all of the time for their announcements with quick promotional videos, video announcements from volunteers, or simple slides you post up before the service begins. While you can use them during church and on your website, you might be missing a huge option to show them off in your entry way and hallways. To fix that, Chromecast is here.
Be Proactive About Announcements
The marketer in me knows that you need to have repetition for a message to stick. In fact, the general rule of thumb is that you need to hear something seven times before you finally make a complete impact on someone. So while making the pitch in the bulletin, the video announcement up front, and on the website or social media account is good, those are all usually one time impacts. Having rolling announcements playing in the halls of your churches on monitors are a great way to promote specific events you want people to hear about.
The best test option and solution for many churches for this is a Chromecast. Simply setup a television on a cart or already installed wall-mounted monitors and then purchase as many Chromecasts as you need. Seriously, at $35 each, you are silly to not try this. Then, plug it in, make a looped video to play on it, and you are done.
Less Likeable Alternatives
Running Cables
Ultimately, if you are going to continue to do this approach, you might want to for a better solution like running cable to your monitors and then running your announcements through presentation software like MediaShout or ProPresenter. In that case, your Chromecast can become the best toy for your youth ministry, a staple sermon tool for on-the-fly illustrations, or something to carry around for any leadership or spiritual retreat presentations that you want to give.
Apple TV
Apple TV essentially runs just like a Chromecast, but is fully integrated with Apple software, unlike Chromecast right now. So if you have fully immersed yourself into Macs and iOS mobile devices, this is your best solution, just know that you are paying $70 more for a bulkier device that has less applications on it. Plus, if you put it on a mounted monitor, you have to use adhesive velcro and nobody wants to do that.
What could having a Chromecast mean for your ministry?
Jesse Gruber says
A wonderful idea. I’ve had one since week one and it’s amazing. The quality is exceptional. I’m not sure I understand what you mean about the apple TV. If you’re making a video, you can cast the tab from and computer running chrome regardless of OS. Are you talking about local videos?
Ps- with Lightstock and their new video service, we’ve unleashed a monster!
seventy8Productions says
No kidding! Didn’t know about the Chrome option, great share!
Jesse Gruber says
Yup. There’s a button directly on YouTube in chrome that will cast your video if your church would do that. I even believe you can use chrome to browse local files on your hard drive and fling them over.
A helpful tip is this: the ability to cast a tab comes through a chrome extension. Go into the settings for the extension and change the fidelity to 420p. This will help relieve stutter when casting a full tab.
Steve Steiner says
I really like this idea, but Google isn’t making it that easy yet. While it might be possible to do this with local files, we do want to do more of the set it and forget it thing. By selecting a video or youtube playlist and telling it to loop, this seems like it should be possible, but at this point it still seems like that isn’t an option. Even if you try to do a playlist, at least on my android, it just brings whatever video you want to play into a new playlist called TV Queue, and even with multiple videos added to TV Queue, that playlist doesn’t give the option to loop. I’ll report back if I find a way to do it though.
Cheryl says
We want to give this a try with the Chromecast. What program are you using to make the video? Thanks so much!
Jeremy Smith says
If you have a Mac, I recommend the free iMovie that comes with it. If PC and you have a small budget, Adobe Primiere is $20/month