Environments matter. Anyone who tells you otherwise… probably has a crappy environment. Ha! I couldn’t resist.
I’m actually doing what I can to improve our current environments. Last year we were hoping to do a 1-1.5 million dollar remodel, but things didn’t play out the way we wanted to. I had a little extra money I didn’t use on some staff positions, so I’m doing some work on our environments because they are in need of attention. Our building is 8 years old and it’s starting to look a little tired. I’ll write more about some of the things we’ve done later, but I had to throw a question out to the audience. I’m in need of some help from those who have some experience in this area.
I had a good friend come visit last may and I asked him for an honest evaluation. Standing in the middle of my ministry lobby he spread his arms around indicating his surroundings and said, “You live in a high tech digital city, yet you’re doing ministry in an analog building.” Wow, so true. So many at our church work at Dell, Apple, Google and about every other tech start-up you can imagine. It seems that if that is a part of our audience, a somewhat digital environment would appeal to this part of our community.
So, I’m 5-6 months out from this project, but I’m trying to do the research now. I want to add 5-6 large screen TV’s (60-65 inch) in our main lobby. Some TV’s will literally have video provided by our curriculum playing possibly interspersed with some of the cool music video worship songs we use in our elementary environment. Other TV’s will display announcements and information. You know how many fast food restaurants and movie theaters use video monitors for their menus now? Well, that’s what I want. I’d rather communicate most of what families need to know via video displays.
I know that I can literally put a video on a thumb drive and plug it into the TV’s USB drive and play the video. There are also several hard drives designed specifically for this purpose. This might be step one for us, we’ll load custom videos on each of these TV’s.
Question Number One: If you’ve have experience with this, do you have any equipment that you recommend. We haven’t bought the TV’s or the drives yet, so any recommendations you have would be highly appreciated.
Question Number Two: There’s a better way than individual hard drives plugged into 5-6 TV’s. I know that TV’s can be connected via network cable and that a HD signal can be sent over network cable and either be converted to HDMI or video could be distributed over the network to be displayed on the TV. I had lunch with a couple of smart men who help me with this kind of stuff. Both work in the market place and are already dreaming up multiple solutions… but I wanted to check with the ministry community because I know this has been done before. What systems/technology/resources do I need to look into?
Hey Kenny,
We have a ton of TV’s in our space. We use them to make announcements, run information on meeting locations, and they also run the service live to create extra space for people to congregate.
Our TV’s are networked through our hub. I’m not sure of the details but just know that all of them run on a single feed on Sunday morning. The other days of the week they run Keynote which cycles announcement slides and our informational meeting space locations.
Our struggle has been the idea of “spending too much”. TVs are a visual cue that you spent money. Not sure if you will run into this or not, but for us it became something that we are rethinking because of the feedback.
I immediately think these things should be on your screens:
-Announcements: possibly kids or teens making these happen
-Parenting walkthrough for the week
-Calls to Action: Volunteering, Small Groups, Missions, Giving, etc.
-Highlights of previous services: Great for campaigns or initiatives in your ministry.
Good luck!
We did the flash drive thing for a while but switched to a Mac mini running pro presenter and I couldn’t be happier. Pro presenter just give so much more flexibility than a simple flash drive. Now we run music videos, promo videos, lesson previews and announcements all interspersed on the same tv thanks to pro presenter. If you are already spending the money do it right and skip the flash drive it just won’t give you the level of control I’m sure you are looking for. We also use a Kramer component/video/audio matrix switcher in order to switch from our children’s ministry announcements and videos to a live service feed for some of our tv’s as well.
Yeah… but we might be sending as many as 3-4 feeds which means having 3-4 separate mac minis. I agree, ProPresenter gives you the most flexibility, but if you want different content on multiple TV’s, it seems limiting to have to invest in 3-4 computers… know what I mean?
I get that. How important is having different content on each TV to you? For me I was fine having the same content on every screen once I was able to mix different formats. With propresenter I can program an announcement slide to be up for 10 seconds then transition to some type of video and back and forth. Usually our screens are running 15-30 different pieces of media on any given Sunday. With the matrix you can hook up one mac mini and then just run lines to each tv. But if seperate content on each tv is a priority then yes that would get very expensive. Like I mentioned we did do the flash drive on each tv and it can work just not my preference.