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Fellowship Church Extends Its Message to Satellite Campuses With Streambox Video Transport
Church Utilizes Streambox Solutions to Stream Live Video of Pastor's Message to Geographically Disbursed Campuses
SEATTLE — June 17, 2008 — Streambox video transport solutions are enabling Fellowship Church, one of the largest churches in the United States, to deliver live video of Pastor Ed Young's message to satellite campuses. The Streambox systems provide a highly reliable and cost-effective solution for encoding, transmitting, and playing out full-motion, full-frame interlaced video and audio of Fellowship Church's services over IP-based networks.
Fellowship Church has deployed a combination of Streambox® SBT3-5100 and SBT3-7100 systems along with a Streambox® Broadcast Server at its main campus in Grapevine, Texas. At each of its Texas satellite campuses in Dallas, Fort Worth, and Plano, as well as at its Miami, Fla., campus, the church has deployed the full duplex Streambox® SBT3-7400 systems, which will eventually enable the church to do bidirectional streaming. Currently, Fellowship Church is doing live point-to-multipoint streaming from Grapevine to each of its four satellite churches. The video transport systems encode and transmit the live video to Fellowship Church's Texas campuses via a dedicated metro Ethernet network at 4 Mbps, and to the Miami satellite via a bonded T1 Internet connection. Streambox's built-in forward error correction helps mitigate packet loss and other network irregularities, which are especially common over the public Internet connection to the Miami campus.
Prior to deploying Streambox solutions, Fellowship Church sent HD tapes of the pastor's message to each location for delayed playback, which reduced the overall immediacy and timeliness of the message in relation to the service at the satellite locations. Today, however, the live video provides churchgoers with virtually the same worship experience as those at the main campus. An on-site worship team at each campus leads the worship service prior to the message. Towards the end of the music set, a VNC network clock visible to the worship leader on the stage of each site reaches :00 seconds. At that exact moment, each campus switches to the live feed of Pastor Young's message from Grapevine. The high-quality standard definition video is displayed on 13-foot by 24-foot center screens and 7-foot by 14-foot side screens at the Dallas, Fort Worth, and Miami locations, and on a 16-foot by 27-foot center screen and 11-foot by 20-foot side screens in Plano.
"The Streambox solution has provided a much more cost-effective means of bringing our entire congregation together compared with other solutions we considered," said Troy Page, who oversees the technology staff at Fellowship Church. "It has created a stronger sense of community and built excitement within our church in the sense that we are one dynamic church with five locations."
"Fellowship Church is an excellent example of the value that high-performance, low-bandwidth video solutions can bring to large houses of worship with multiple locations and geographically dispersed congregations," said Bob Hildeman, chairman and CEO at Streambox. "We're pleased that Streambox plays an integral role in helping Fellowship Church reach out to its church at large and in creating a sense of immediacy for its satellite congregations."
More information about Streambox solutions is available online at www.streambox.com
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