The Church of Champions, an international house of worship located in Houston, has deployed Haivision's KulaByte Internet video encoder to enable reliable, 1080p live streaming of its services and other events to Internet audiences and congregations at its numerous affiliate churches in North America and Argentina.
"Live Internet streaming with KulaByte is a critical component in our ability to share our message with the widest-possible audience, on the platform of their choice whether a desktop or mobile device, and with HD quality that rivals that of any professional broadcaster," said Wendell Hutchins, pastor and founder of the Church of Champions. "And, as a big plus for our volunteer technical team, KulaByte is extremely user-friendly and easy to use. The high-speed, high-quality streaming capabilities of KulaByte will become even more important as we continue executing our vision to deliver a consistent, simultaneous live worship experience to multiple campuses."
Haivision's AV solutions provider partner on this project, Whitlock has delivered implementation and support services for the KulaByte encoder, which is currently used along with Haivision's HyperStream Live cloud-based live transcoding service to stream the second Sunday morning service and other events from Church of Champions' 1,000-seat main sanctuary in Houston. Internet audiences can watch the services live or on demand from the church's Web video channel, http://www.champ.tv/. The initial webcast of the Sunday morning service last November drew more than 600 unique viewers; since then, the Internet audience has grown to thousands every Sunday.
"From a system design standpoint, our goal was to enable people with any type of Internet capability to access church content at the highest-possible resolution," said Jon Litt, account executive at Whitlock. "KulaByte has enabled us to do this with the least amount of hardware and bussing, enabling the stream to be tamed according to the device pulling down the content — whether it's a DSL line, a wireless coffee shop connection, or even a dial-up connection. Also, Haivision's HyperStream Live service has enabled the church to avoid costly third-party transcoding services for all of the various delivery platforms."
The KulaByte system delivers very high-quality HD streams to smaller affiliate churches that lack all of the resources to conduct their own services. Churches without a pastor can take the live feed of Pastor Hutchins' sermon at a designated time following their own music program; likewise, churches without music can stream the musical segment of the main church's service.
"With KulaByte, we can produce quality video content that we can pipe to any platform, anywhere in the world," said Hutchins. "There is literally no limit to the people we can reach, especially as word gets out that the content can be accessed from anywhere and with the same quality, regardless of platform or device."
More information about KulaByte and the Haivision product family is available at www.haivision.com
