EditShare Enables Houses of Worship to Connect With Online Congregants

EditShare, LLC has been chosen by several large-scale houses of worship to provide each unique operation with an enterprise-strength media platform to sustain the fgrowing audiences seeking their church experiences online.

The Potter’s House of Dallas, Inc., World Changers Church International in Georgia, and Hillsong Church in Australia are using EditShare’s EFS shared storage and FLOW media management to facilitate their hybrid video production needs and increase programming to boost engagement with congregants, anywhere and everywhere.

“With the shift to online, connecting with our congregants in the digital world has become even more important. We want to share stories in a way that when they are seen, our members understand how we are giving back to the community. In order to engage congregants on this level, we needed to do more than stream Wednesday and Sunday services. We needed to think about the production value. Everything from the music we choose, to the way we light the scene, to how we shoot and layer in graphics to create an experience that our online congregants can engage with,” states Antao Tywii Ayers-Allen, TV production, The Potter’s House of Dallas. “There are many moving parts in these stories and EditShare helps us manage all of the parts in a way that we can easily index, search, use, collaboratively edit, and archive for later use. It’s a media foundation that enables us to get to the next level of production.“

Ministries are using EditShare solutions to produce and deliver church services as well as pre-recorded studio shows, documentaries, commercials, and educational programs over traditional, digital, and social channels. Unlike traditional networks, these shows, conferences, and podcasts are produced all in-house. Similar to conventional OTT streaming services, some ministries offer yearly subscriptions to their branded channel.

“The day-to-day media operations of large-scale ministries increasingly resemble that of a fully-fledged 24/7 broadcast network with thousands of hours of content to manage,” states Tracy Geist, CMO, EditShare. “Using an off the shelf non-media solution to store and manage the content is not an option. EditShare provides the media optimized workflow infrastructure that enables them to redefine the content strategy and deliver the engaging experience they want for those attending the service in person or connecting online.“

According to Barna research, 70% of churchgoers agree that even after the pandemic, houses of worship should continue to use digital resources to engage with congregants. EditShare’s media platform is the basis for workflows that are instrumental in helping houses of worship create engaging content at a higher quality. In what is likely in the future to be a hybrid model, where congregants participate in services both at the church and online, EditShare is an optimized and productive foundation for large-scale video content production.

The lead engineer for The Potter’s House TV department, Fletcher Garrett, explains the importance of a workflow platform: “Engineers at houses of worship with responsibilities ranging from TV broadcasts, streaming and social media content want to know, How do I record live services and performances, and get it ready for distribution as fast as possible? This all comes back to the media platform you plug your cameras and editing system into. EditShare provides the automation and workflow efficiencies that let you capture directly to storage, automate tagging of content, making it immediately searchable to your editors for packaging and distributing over traditional, digital, and social channels. What is paramount is that the media system is secure, stable and dependable and I have found that EditShare’s systems meet those demands!“

In addition to facilitating production and post-production media workflows for short and long form studio and live programs, ministries are using the advanced AI features of FLOW for speech to text transcription on every piece of video recorded. FLOW automates the logging, making it searchable and instantly available for repurposing and sharing.

Geist adds: “One of the biggest challenges is logging the massive amount of content these productions capture in a way that you can quickly and easily locate that special moment or important message. The AI capabilities of FLOW automate the entire transcription and logging process so editors can turn out more personalized programs faster.“