Posted by flickerfly on August 22, 2008 at 7:42pm
I haven't done this myself yet so I shant comment. In trying to figure out what sort of questions a church new to using drupal might ask, I happened on this one. "How do you do a sermon podcast?"
Perhaps those actually doing this could share their version of drupal, the modules they depend on and any other tip that might be appropriate in helping others complete this task. This will help us build up resources for others to get started. It might even be a good start towards the case studies we'd like to build up or be something we could start formatting into a wiki page.
Comments
Try our service SermonCast.com
SermonCast comes with an entire media management platform- something you could not build with drupal without a lot of money and/or time for custom modules, etc. And why build something custom when SermonCast already does it?
The SermonCast media player integrates with any church website including drupal sites.
Very powerful and easy to use, and the best value of any sermon podcasting service. Free to start and very low cost after. Over 7,000 churches and ministries use the service.
www.SermonCast.com
Also if you've got a podcast consider joining our directory of Christian podcasts - Godcast1000.com. Over 1100 Christian podcasts. We will be launching Christian podcasting resources on the next version of Christian.com as well.
God bless,
Lee
Obi-Wan (Lee Raney)
Dallas Drupal Group
www.DrupalJedi.com
Christian.com Media Group, Inc.
www.Christian.com
www.SermonCast.com
My Blog: www.LinkedInJesus.com
Lee Raney
Dallas Drupal Group
www.ChurchFinder.com
SermonCast looks like an
SermonCast looks like an interesting tool. How can it be integrated with a Drupal based site? Is there an API or a module or something?
Yes SermonCast can be used on any website
The player is a widget that can be plugged into any website. The admin panel is very comprehensive so you would not want to try to integrate it with drupal admin roles. There is nothing like it in drupal.
Obi-Wan (Lee Raney)
Dallas Drupal Group
www.Christian.com
Lee Raney
Dallas Drupal Group
www.ChurchFinder.com
Is there any good research
Is there any good research to determine if podcasting sermons is even worth the hassle?
What are the demographics of congregants most likely to use them?
Since we post our sermons to GodTube and link them from our Web site I wonder who might choose to listen only to the audio. Perhaps that is more of a urban commuter thing?
http://firstbaptistchurchsh.com
Pastor David
http://thebridgechristianlifecenter.com
Pastor David
My experience with having
My experience with having sermons online and the feedback I received indicated that we had listeners to archived sermons that were primarily people interested in finding out more about the church, of members of sister churches around the world who were looking to hear sermons.
Where we had the bulk of our activity was our live stream - we piped the live service out to the web via an MP3 stream. This was primarily used by families home with sick kids (several on any given service), though we had occasional listeners from other parts of the world.
This of course is one experience in a very small church setting, not a demographic study, but hopefully it's helpful.
Purpose and demographic
I think podcasting really depends on what you are putting out there, how you are sharing it, and your demographics.
My church puts out their sermons and bible classes as podcasts. People who miss a service or are shut ins tend to use this to listen. There is less distribution cost than CDs. I'm aware of people in their 70's using this all the way down to as young as people want to listen to what they missed.
The bible class online is setup for people who miss a week or want to take the class but can't make the time. There are over 15 people who signed up for homework based bible study who listen to the lecture online. Many others just listen to the lecture.
This is a different demographic than if you did a podcast meant for the web. My church has one of those. We have listeners from those in their 20's up through those in their 60's and 70's. It's a matter of letting them know they are there and making them easy to use.
The congregation I attend is in the burbs and some have said it borders on rural.
Matt Farina
www.innovatingtomorrow.net
www.geeksandgod.com
www.superaveragepodcast.com
www.mattfarina.com
We use audio module
We recently re-did our web site, and wanted to include the sermons. Since we already record the services on CD, it was easy to upload the sermons as audio podcasts. I used the Audio module to do this, which works well. It allows me to FTP the sermon recordings to the web site and then import them. You can see it at http://www.fumcsantarosa.org/sermons.
The primary audience are those who are not afraid of the web (leaves out many of our older members) and either heard a sermon and want to hear it again, or missed it, or want to hear the sermon at our other location. (We have 2 locations and a different sermon/pastor at each location.) Our pastors tell me that they often tell people about the sermons on the web site. We don't get a lot of listens, an average of about 10 per sermon. I consider that 10 people who might not otherwise hear them, a good thing.
We also have a CD ministry where we duplicate CDs right after our largest service and make them available during the fellowship time, about 15 minutes after the end of the service. We also distribute the CDs to those who cannot attend a service, especially shut-ins. We give out about 6-12 CDs per week. Some people want to hear the service, or parts of it, again, also a good thing.
I considered using other modules, such as the Assets module, which also promised video, but there was a bug in that module, which has now been fixed. I would look at it again if I were to start over.
We plan to move to videocasting some time soon, and I will look at the modules that support video. I have found that it is straightforward to encode a video to Flash (using Quick Media Converter) and then play that video using JW FLV Media Player and hardcoding the link as shown on the http://www.jeroenwijering.com/?item=jw_flv_player site. I did this for another web site, and it got a video up without needing any module other than the external JW FLV Media Player. This approach is not suitable for nonprogrammers but it is straightforward.
audio - stats - S3?
We also use the audio module for our messages ( http://www.gracecommunity.ws/messagelist ) which we then re-use on a central message page (gets an average of 50-75 visits per month), an iTunes feed, and special message collection pages which gather all messages and other resources on a topic together.
According to the stats (provided from the audio module) - each message over time has an average of about 100 downloads, and 10-15 plays. With some messages getting downloaded 1000+ times. The podcast is much smaller.
The volume of downloads is increasing and pushing our bandwidth limit, so I am looking into the media mover module to help us store the files on Amazon S3 storage. But that module does not integrate with audio - but I may be able to get the same results using CCK+mediafield+media_mover+views+itunes_view to get the same result.
So it seems to be very successful from our experience. We've gotten emails from the other side of the country when there are issues with the podcast - so it is surprising how wide the reach can be.
I've been posting my sermons
I've been posting my sermons as an audio podcast for a couple years now; can't remember when I started. We get 1000-1500 downloads/month (measured by podtrac), which, considering we have ~60-70 people in church on any given Sunday, means way more people are listening online than live. We've gotten some comments from listeners: someone in Japan who lives too far from a Lutheran church to attend, a widow of a former pastor here, a commercial pilot who listens to sermons while flying across the country, the pastor at the church on top of Mt. Carmel in Israel, and a few others. Only 68% of our downloads are from the USA. 2.5% are from China, which really excites me, since the Gospel is hard to get there. China actually blocked it for a few months, but it opened up again beginning of this year.
My goal is simply to throw digital seeds out there for the most part, but also to give people who want to know more about the church a chance to do so.
And yes, our church website is horrible, but that's due to a lack of geeks in the rural Iowa congregation, of which I'm the only one, and I've been too busy with local ministry to do much more. That's more of a self-indictment than an excuse, though, because I know we could be doing so much more.
Pastor Dale
http://crossfeednews.com/podcast
Pastor Dale
http://crossfeednews.com/podcast
How did you do the list?
I'm looking to do something similar to what you did on http://www.gracecommunity.ws/messagelist[the Grace Community Church site and wondered how you got the list of messages with the player embedded. I'm pretty sure you used the views module, but I haven't been able to figure out the embedded player and the drop down filters that you included at the top for sorting the messages.
Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks.
standard taxononomy - old-style audio module
That page is done using a view.
The audio player comes from the audio module - one of the fields it makes available to views is player/flash.
The filters are also from the view:
- create 2 taxonomies (speaker/series), add them to the audio content type
- add 2 taxonomy term filters to the view - set to One of: - and select all of the wanted terms
- expose these 2 filters - this causes the drop downs to be displayed.
FYI - I am in the process of converting the audio nodes into raw CCK types - like G&G recommended - but with the audio files being hosted on Amazon S3. - so eventually I will need to replace the player field with another type of field.
Thanks for posting the details on how!
Thanks for posting the details on how to set that up!
It's something I tried, personally, but just couldn't ever seem to get to work. Now maybe I'll know what to look for "player/flash" and be able to find that, and continue to do things with the Audio module for the time being.
I'm also hoping to move towards the method mentioned on Geeks and God, so I can have more control over everything. But it'll probably be a little while, yet. ;0)
Edit: Actually, it appears that I don't have the option - Player/Flash. Is there some specific module I need to tick other than the default Audio module?
I tried a few other modules (enabling), but nothing. I tried the Views Bonus module, still nothing. Perhaps I'm just missing a step...
I don't have the
I don't have the player/flash field option either; only Download Count, Downloadable, Length, and Play Count. Which version of Drupal and the audio module are you using?
Thanks.
Drupal 5.10 / Audio 5.x-1.4
Perhaps they haven't ported that view format to 6? Especially since they are moving away from all-in-one modules to things like XSF Tools.
I've attached a screenshot of what my view options are.
Screenshot?
Where's the screenshot? I think you pulled one of my tricks - forgetting to add the attachment you referenced. ;0)
comment attachments
I dunno. The file attachment was there on the comment submission form - but apparently the theme does not display the comment file attachments - and nothing happens when I click on the comment header.
Another thing I thought about...
I had another person tell me they had to install the Views Bonus Pack to get it to work. I tried that as well, but I still do not see anything - could be b/c I don't know what I'm doing with the Views Bonus Pack, as well. ;0) I didn't take the time, yet, to read up on that module from its documentation.
Oh well..
Well, if you happen to have it on one of the image sharing sites, or your own site, you could just paste a link. Otherwise, we can probably get the gist without the print screen. ;)
I found the solution for how
I found the solution for how to do this using a patch posted at Add Views2 Support, Post #17. I haven't figured out how to get the "Title" field in the Title table column to link to the node referenced, but the patch really made setting this up relatively easy.
HTH
Thanks for the info!
I know I hope to give this a shot sometime soon, assuming I get the time. ;0)
Taxonomy
Is anyone categorizing sermons by books of the Bible, topic, passage or anything like that? Is there any evidence that people are more likely to use archived sermons if they are more easily discoverable than most sites provide for?
If you haven't seen Mustard
If you haven't seen Mustard Seed Media's podcast on this subject and the new module that Rob commissioned, check it out.
http://mustardseedmedia.com/podcast/episode14
It is the way I've been working on, but missing the podcast element. Well, the podcast part is now solved thanks to a new module. I'll be putting this to work real soon.
Drupal 6.9 and Audio 6.x-1.0-unstable3
I have Drupal 6.9
and
Audio 6.x-1.0-unstable3
...boy, this shoulda been up under the conversation I'm so involved in within this thread, but of course , I managed to put it in the wrong place!
Call for a demo of SermonCast
I would say if you want to do it yourself and want to host and stream your own video and it has to be in drupal then go with some of the modules/recos listed here, but honestly check out SermonCast and call for a free demo, and you will realize you can spend hundreds of hours trying to build it in drupal and php and flash or just get SermonCast which is free for audio and very inexpensive for video.
I really think it is the best solution available right now. I am not advertising because I make almost nothing on a single new church sign-up (we have 7,000 using the service so I only make a profit on volume) so I have no hidden motives here except to save some people a lot of time and hassle.
That being said, within the next few months we will have some other things we offer to churches related to drupal and the new Christian.com site (April 2009) that will be very helpful as well.
If any of you are at drupalcon see you there!
Lee
Obi-Wan (Lee Raney)
Dallas Drupal Group
www.Christian.com
Lee Raney
Dallas Drupal Group
www.ChurchFinder.com
Drupal beats Sermoncast
I just moved a church form Sermoncast to a simple Drupal solution using Flashnode and swftools modules. It took no more than 2 hours to set-up, not 'hundreds of hours,' and the church is much happier with it than the very limited free version of Sermoncast.
I'm sure Sermoncast is a good choice for some people, but if you have the slightest bit of Drupal experience, you can easily build a solution that is more more flexible, and much better integrated with your own website.
Best,
Matt
Drupal.org user profile
Portfolio: http://www.NinjitsuHosting.com/portfolio
Drupal Micro-blogging: http://twitter.com/matt2000
Drupal.org user profile
Drupal Micro-blogging: http://twitter.com/matt2000
Would love to see it
Sorry first I should have mentioned that it depends on the version of SermonCast you are on since the free old version is pretty basic. Also when I said "hundreds of hours" first I admit that was an exaggeration someone with drupal expertise could do quicker and second I was more talking about the "Media Manager" back-end adminstration, reporting, etc., which would take some time to duplicate.
But drupal is certainly powerful and would love to see what you have done...what is the website?
Lee
Obi-Wan (Lee Raney)
Dallas Drupal Group
www.Christian.com
Lee Raney
Dallas Drupal Group
www.ChurchFinder.com
using outside hosting
We're looking into this and may just upload the videos to a site like ustream.tv or blip.tv, etc. and display the videos on the drupal site using the emfield module.
There's also tangle.com (formerly godtube)