They’ve been trying to stream services from Vero Bible Fellowship since the 2020 COVID lockdowns. But this Vero Beach, Florida portable church is worshipping in a middle school and the lack of quality internet has been a huge problem.
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The Teradek Prism Mobile encoder received the Church Production Road Test Certification. Learn more here.
“So, we started live streaming at a middle school with unreliable internet and really no help to troubleshoot it,” says Ericka Reardin who is Vero Bible Church’s freelance tech director. “They [the schools] have an IT department, but they're so busy with all the schools that they're working with, the people that rent the facility are a lesser priority.”
“Sometimes we would start a service and then five minutes in it would just completely lose it." - Ericka Reardin, Freelance Tech Director, Vero Beach, Florida
Understanding that the school staff was limited in how much they could help, the church staff struggled for several years trying to get a live stream to work.
“Sometimes we would start a service and then five minutes in it would just completely lose it. And the problem was also that we don't have a way to really see the internals of all the internet and the monitoring and things like that except for what we're seeing on Facebook and how it's going out and so we weren't able to really see what is causing these issues,” Reardin explains. “We could barely stream at 720p. It barely will chug along at a super low kilobytes per second.”
Teradek Prism Mobile encoder is packed with features, but the silver bullet for this church’s problem was network bonding.
And for those who could not be at church, especially with an older population who is at home wondering why the stream isn’t working, Reardin says it was really frustrating. “Imagine trying to sing a worship song and it's just completely freezing every couple of seconds and you're missing whatever scripture the pastor's referencing and you don't know what he said. So now, you're stuck and you don't know where he is because your screen keeps dropping. People may not come back. It's incredibly distracting.”
Reardin had had an opportunity to road-test a portable connectivity solution to their internet problem – the Teradek Prism Mobile, part of Teradek’s Prism line of encoders. It’s packed with features, but the silver bullet for this church’s problem was network bonding. For maximum reliability and redundancy, Prism Mobile can bond and combine the bandwidth from up to nine network connections across cellphone hotspots (4x), Ethernet (2x), and cellular modems (3x). And the fact that it’s mobile means it’s designed to prevent streaming internet problems allowing users to stream 4K HDR video from challenging locations.
Reardin says it worked. “So, with the Teradek Prism Mobile, basically we're combining multiple sources of bandwidth. We're able to get it flawlessly because we're combining those sources. What the church members are seeing with the Teradek Prism Mobile is a completely stable stream, whereas before we were having constant dropouts.”
She says there are several different inputs and outputs, so for their purposes, they were doing HDMI in and using the Teradek RTMP streaming to go directly to Facebook through their Core cloud services, but the unit does also offer 12G-SDI connections for higher-end applications.
Reardin explains that it wasn’t difficult to set up. “So, basically, we were just connecting our RTMP server going directly to Facebook, hit ‘go live,’ and we were good to go. There were a couple of things that we had to set up prior, but it was nothing super crazy, frames per second and all of those things but it was super easy to do. I mean, it took probably less than 10 minutes.
Reardin says the streaming platform receives the signal from your encoder and while they connected to Facebook, with Teradek’s Core cloud-based encoder management system and routing platform you can control where the feeds are going, even to multiple destinations.
For this smaller portable church, having fewer problems on Sunday morning was a real blessing. “With the mobile church, you know, there's just so many <laughs>, so many things on any given Sunday that that can go wrong, and sometimes they do. And so, the internet and the streaming part of it is just sometimes the cherry on top of the craziness. So, the more reliable we can get there. A lot of stress goes down.”
