Category Archives: the ridge

Props to  Gary Lamb for the idea behind Things We Tried That Sucked!

Internet Campus

Before we ever had our first official service as a church, we started playing with the technology and equipment that would allow us to broadcast our services and events live on our own internet channel.  We called it an iCampus.  We had NO idea what we were doing.  So like anybody with passion and a dream, we just did what we knew and worked with what we had.  That worked OK for a little while.

We started broadcasting our launch team gatherings and preview services.  We never really garnered much attention online because we didn’t advertise at all at this point.  The most we had online was about 15-20 at a time.  It’s not a bad start, but here is why it sucked and why we ultimately pulled the plug on it.

• The quality was bad. We didn’t have good lighting in our venue to get a good enough quality video, even though we had a great camera.  It doesn’t have to be perfect quality, but people at least want to see who is on stage.
• Sound quality was not very good.  It wasn’t until the end that we figured out how to get good sound quality in the venue we were meeting in.  That hurt worse than the video.
• Internet connection was iffy.  What ultimately did us in was the venue we started out in, had an iffy connection.  People would complain about freezing and such.  We determined it wasn’t so much the connection, it was the broadcasting program we were using.  It was new technology at the time and it wasn’t really tested yet.
• Our new venue had even worse connection problems. Our new and current venue is a hotel.  Lots of people are using bandwidth every Sunday so to broadcast would be very difficult.

So after a few months of “testing” we decided to pull the plug until we figured some things out.  We had the right people on board to make it work, but just had some things not working in our favor at the time.  It was never a completely dead project.  In fact, we are currently about to begin testing again with some newer technology, better equipment, and a better sense of what we’re doing.  Just because something fails, doesn’t mean it’s dead.  iCampus may very well live again soon.