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Ideas on video conferencing

Posted: Sun Apr 19, 2009 8:08 am
by johnsco-p40
Hello,
Need some ideas on the following project:
Our stake consist of 11 wards with 3 wards, in buildings, 40 miles away, 5 wards, in buildings, 8 miles in seperate directions from the Stake Center and 3 wards at the Stake Center.
The Stake Presdency has a desire to broadcast Stake Conference, via video, from the Stake Center to the outlying buildings. All the buildings have an existing DSL line to the building. I have made arrangements with our local Telco to increase the bandwidth speed to 4mbit. I have also looked at a couple of video conferencing systems from Cisco, and Lifesize. At this time all we need is one-way conferencing (from the Stake Center to the Ward Buildings.
Question:
1. Does anyone know if the Church has this kind of equipment available for use by individual Stakes?
(I was thinking they would buy that equipment in bulk, but maybe not)
2. Who is the contact person for information?

If anyone has this type of system running already or have had experience setting one up please let me know. Right now the biggest contraint is capital funds, so I would like to knwo what has been done in other Stakes.

Thanks in advance

Posted: Sun Apr 19, 2009 8:52 am
by MorettiDP
You are in luck! The Church released recently a new program called "Meetinghouse Webcast". This program turn possible send and receive audio and video by internet from a meetinghouse to one or more other meetinghouses. You will find more informations at this link: https://tech.lds.org/wiki/index.php/Mee ... se_Webcast.

Stakes in U.S. and Canada can purchase the equipment by order from Church Distribution Services (http://www.ldscatalog.com). In international areas you can request authorization from the local ICS Office at your area (I hope Brazil Area will turn this option available in the near future).

I belive this posts need to be sent to another area of the forum. Please, moderators, send this to the best area (thanks).

Video conferencing is also available

Posted: Mon Apr 20, 2009 7:49 am
by GerrardSL
For your situation, you do want to use the webcast capability. It works very well. For future, you can purchase video conference equipment through Distribution to use in the building as well. You must be logged in as a stake to see the options. They are under unit administration, communications technology in the US catalog. Internationally, work with the distribution center to purchase. A number of stakes around the world have purchased equipment for interactive virtual meetings, including conference with speakers at different locations. This is a lot more complicated than webcast which would be the preferred choice.

These can be expensive, particularly if you have lots of units you want to include, so we're looking for a good desktop computer solution that would use web cams. When we're ready to release this, we'll make an announcement in this forum.

Remote video conferencing

Posted: Thu May 07, 2009 6:37 pm
by dklotter-p40
In our Stake we installed a HD camera in the Chapel, we fed the audio and video signals into to sling box. The sling box was connected to a high speed internet connection, and the remote building logged into the sling box. After logging into the sling box (remotely) with a laptop, the video output was run through a projector onto the chapel screen. The audio signal was patched into the buildings audio system. It took us 15 minutes to setup the system on each end, and our conference went off without a hitch. This was a low cost solution, and took a couple of dry runs to get out the bugs but it worked well.
We did have a phone backup for audio just in case the system crashed for any reason.

Posted: Fri May 08, 2009 9:40 am
by SheffieldTR
The down sides are that you are using a commercial solution that the church does not support, so you are on your own as far as support goes. Secondly, there is no control over who has access too or how long those files are on the Internet because the church does not control the servers that slingbox uses to reflect those signals from one location to the other. Thirdly, nothing else can be added to your stream in the future based on the technology that you are using. Fourthly, you can only go to one other location. For about the same amount of money you could go to many with the Meetinghouse Webcast solution.

I am glad that you had a successful conference though!