After the busyness of Holy Week, what have the tech team been up to?

New PC for the tech desk

Since the beginning of the first lockdown, way back in March last year, every service we’ve streamed has involved some element of borrowed equipment.

This week we finally installed the last piece of the puzzle to allow services to be entirely streamed using our own gear – a small PC that lets the technician manage some of the more advanced features of our video mixer, start and stop the stream, keep an eye on our infrastructure, play audio files and more.

Because we love automation this PC has been hooked into our existing user and device management system, seamlessly setting up user accounts and configuring security policies.

Recording the services

We’ve attached a high-speed disk to the video mixer, so we can directly record services in high quality. In the past we’ve always had to include an extra step in our process to record services, so this not only simplifies our own content pathways for things we do with recordings (like pulling out service audio to deliver via phones and podcasts) and adds certainty that we get a good recording, but also gives us the possibility of offering video recordings of services such as weddings.

Improving the connectivity to the church

Following a particularly bad spell of connectivity which affected our streaming, we spent some time finding and fixing the problem.