media salt

I’ve had a lot of conversations lately about the way we handle our media online at Long Hollow (you can check out our Watch/Listen section here if you like). We’ve had a relatively strong online media presence for the last few years, publishing our audio and video from Sunday morning on the site and through our podcasts in about 24 hours. Previously, we used the ubiquitous JW Player to embed Flash-encoded videos to our site, and it worked fine.

After we launched our redesigned site in February, it was obvious that our video approach had grown a little long in the tooth. Not only were our videos kind of small, but they seemed to take forever to load due to the inefficient FLV format we had to use for the player. With these shortcomings in mind, I began to actively pursue other video options for our site.

Let me just tell you now… There are thousands of solutions out there, and every vendor is convinced that they are the best one. After scouring the internet and other church sites for a few days, I boiled down my choices to the the following options:

• Pay for a high-caliber service that hosts and streams the videos for a monthly fee.
• Hire a Flash geek to build a slick custom player that we could reuse for everything we do.
• See what I can get away with for cheap.

Being on staff at a church, I always try to be the best steward I can be with the resources given to me, and sometimes I surprise myself with how much I can accomplish these days on a shoe string budget. Although I saw a lot of great church video services during my search, I settled on the third option and simply purchased a $59/yr subscription to Vimeo Plus.

It surprises a lot of folks to know that we depend on Vimeo for all of our online video needs, but when you look at all of the pros associated with their Plus service, it’s easy to overlook any cons. For starters, it’s just dirt cheap. They have some of the best video quality in the industry. Their player is fully customizable, simple to use, and easy to integrate into your own site. Best of all, you get the benefit of a growing service that continues to add new features and enhancement to product every day. Why go through the hassle of creating a custom player from scratch when there are high-quality/inexpensive solution like this available?

Now you know what we use; what has your ministry been using for their multimedia needs? Do you have a better solution than Vimeo? Let us know in the comments below.