Monday, December 26, 2005

Streaming Media

Today at church we started our annual (2nd year in a row counts as annual, right) Bible reading Marathon. What happens is that people go in and read the bible in 15 minute increments. We go 24 hours a day from Genesis through Revelation. I think last year we finished up around 2pm Thursday. So now you know that it's possible to read through the bible in less than 4 days. I haven't actually read, but I have found it neat to just sit or stand and listen.

This year I was asked to set-up live audio of the marathon over the Internet. Thankfully I had a months notice for this one. Truly though I was stymied. What the heck do I know about streaming live audio over the Internet? All we had was the microphone and sound board.

I didn't know if we needed a dedicated computer to send the audio, and I was pretty sure our DSL connection wouldn't let more than one or two people connect at once. But then really, how many people were going to listen? I still have no idea.

Obviously I was lost. I got some information from one e-mail. As it always seems to be, if someone knows how to do something they have a hard time explaining it to someone who knows nothing at all about the field. I mean, what's DSM, or ShoutCast, or Bit Rate? Trust me, these are all important things to know.

I saw a bunch of hosting sites willing to do this, for $400 or more a month! This was way too expensive. But it was hard since I wanted to stream audio 24 hours a day where most services do it for an hour or so, during a meeting or maybe one church service.

I did get one other hint after searching the Internet for ShoutCast and came across one of those great gems of a site called SleepyEngineers.com. Here they had pretty inexpensive hosting and broke down the price exactly how I wanted it. To top it all off they had a page walking you through what to download and how to configure everything on your local computer. It was perfect, and at $5 a month for 10 users (and easy to increase) it was definitely cost effective.

So I got everything set-up and running. So, right at this very moment you can listen to someone at our church reading the bible. It'll also let us stream the entire church services. When you think about it, wow incredibly awesome is that?

The sound of someone's voice is getting broken apart into little bits of data, shot out over the Internet available for the entire world to hear. Truly, you have to check it out.

So, give it a try. It probably doesn't seem as cool when you're listening. When you're standing in a room with people and hearing their voice come back over the Internet (after a 1 - 2 minute delay) it's just awe inspiring.

Do me a favor and give it a listen. Let me know what you think. All I know is that God works some pretty amazing things through this gift of technology.

Peace,
+Tom/Bob

1 comment(s):

I agree--amazing! I'm It's 11PM and I'm listening to Maddy read now.

By Anonymous Anonymous, at 12/27/2005 10:52 PM  

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