FourSquare Church Streams Good Word to Satellite Sites

One of Washington State’s largest houses of worship, Puyallup Foursquare Church, has implemented the Streambox® SBT3-9200 video transport solution to seamlessly deliver live HD video of Senior Pastor Roger Archer’s sermons to the church’s satellite campus. With a highly reliable and cost-effective method of transmitting high-quality video, the church now has an expandable means of keeping even its most remote members engaged in worship.

With a total congregation nearing 5,000 and at least 3,000 regular worshippers every weekend, Puyallup Foursquare Church serves a broad area of central-western Washington and suburban Tacoma. Since the main building in Puyallup seats only 1,100, the church opened its first satellite campus in Silvercreek, Wash. more than two years ago. However, with this rapid growth, church leaders were concerned that the immediacy and interactive nature of the services would be lost with the expansion to multiple locations.

“Our pastor charged us with finding a way to bring his Sunday message to everyone without losing his ability to interact with the audience, including the remote congregation — and any real signal delay would make this impossible. When we saw a demonstration of Streambox at the NAB show, we knew we had found the ideal solution,” said Brent Todd, technical director and associate pastor of Puyallup Foursquare Church. “Not only is the Streambox encoding/decoding system extremely reliable and easy to operate, but it has enabled us to preserve Pastor Archer’s unique communication style. The Silvercreek congregation loves the high-quality HD images, and Streambox continues to provide excellent technical support as we evolve and grow the system moving forward.”

Based on Streambox’s award-winning ACT-L3™ codec, the SBT3-9200 system encodes and transmits the live HD video from the church’s Puyallup sanctuary to Silvercreek during Sunday services with less than one second of delay and an average data rate of 10 Mbps. An on-site worship team at the satellite campus leads music and other worship components until Pastor Archer’s message is ready to be delivered, at which time the campus switches to the live feed. The high-quality HD video is displayed on multiple large screens in Silvercreek and a return feed showing the remote audience is delivered back to a monitor near the pastor so he can identify and recognize congregation members. Although the return feed is currently being provided via Apple’s iChat video conferencing, the church will soon be utilizing the Streambox® Live™ IP-based contribution service to deliver a better-quality return and provide a closed-loop system.

By Easter, Puyallup Foursquare Church plans to open another satellite campus in Tacoma with up to ten additional campuses planned over the next decade. Although currently transmitting the Streambox signal via microwave antenna, the church will soon make use of the SBT3-9200′s point-to-multipoint streaming capabilities over low-bandwidth IP networks to serve the multiple locations.

“We’re pleased that Puyallup Foursquare Church has joined the growing list of houses of worship that are turning to Streambox video transport solutions to maintain a sense of intimacy and community, even as their congregations grow to several thousand members,” said Bob Hildeman, chairman and CEO of Streambox. “Our encoding solutions offer everything churches require when connecting multiple sites via streaming video — namely high performance, reliability, and outstanding picture quality in a cost-effective and easy-to-use package.”

More info: www.streambox.com.