New Live Stream

It was basically a year ago that everything shut down. I went back and read the newsletters around that time, which was interesting in seeing how much we didn’t know and just guessed at, like hoping to be back to in-person worship by Palm Sunday or Easter.

What I also did on that last Sunday before we stopped in-person worship was to put my phone on a tripod and connect it to Facebook to do a live stream. And basically we’ve done the same thing since then.

We knew that we wanted to increase our streaming capabilities, because it’s not going to go away, and we knew some of the steps, but didn’t know everything we needed to know or the technical steps to do it. In the fall, One Board addressed the issue and allocated funding to try and take us to the next level. A small task force was formed and we hoped to get everything rolling with a possibility of having the upgrades done by the beginning of the year.

We searched for assistance through different contacts that people had here in Los Alamos, without any success. And so then we put an ad in the paper looking for a consultant, and on Christmas Eve, looking for some alternative Christmas wrapping, Gabe, who lives in White Rock, saw the ad and contacted us. He had spent the spring and summer working with churches in Montana getting them online, and had the just the skills we needed.

Since the end of January, Gabe has been working with us to install new equipment and software and testing things out, and we are ready to go live this Sunday with our new livestream. You will notice much better sound quality, as it’s coming directly from the mics, and we now have the ability to zoom with different camera angles. It will also allow us to show videos in worship, which we could not do on the stream before.

I will note two things: The first is that not all of the equipment is installed yet, and so some other improvements are coming. But, we have enough in place to do what we want to do. The second is that we are just learning how to run the software. In fact, our first training is tomorrow evening at 5 pm. So, please give a little grace as we learn from our mistakes. If there are things you notice we can improve, please let us know. Please also tell us what we are doing well.

You may continue to watch worship on Facebook and YouTube, and this should solve the problems we have had with YouTube recently, and you may also watch it on our website, firstinyourheart.org.

It’s taken us awhile to get here, but I am really happy with what we have and think you will be as well. I can say that one person who watched a test of the new stream last week said “I feel like I really worshipped!”