To answer my own question, I'll report on some of our research. Here's what we found:
Setup
- Church Webcast: If you have the correct calling, getting the church webcast set up is very quick and easy.
- You Tube: I believe it takes time (24 hours), email addresses, and phone numbers to set up. There have been some other posts about setting up You Tube accounts which provide more details.
Scheduling a Broadcast
- Church Webcast: All broadcasts must be scheduled in advance. You generally need at least a 30-minute advance setup for it to work.
- You Tube: Once you're set up, starting to send a stream is instant. You don't need to schedule anything.
Pre-Broadcast and Broadcast
- Church Webcast: You see Tabernacle Choir and other church videos while waiting for the broadcast to start. You keep church branding. When you start streaming, it automatically shows the broadcast.
- You Tube: You wait for the stream to start. I believe you have the app it will automatically start but if you're going through a web browser you need to periodically refresh to see if the live stream has started.
End of Program
- Church Webcast: When streaming stops, it goes back to showing Tabernacle Choir videos. Nothing was recorded, so there's no need to do anything.
- You Tube: Depending on your settings, you may see nothing, or You Tube might suddenly jump into showing other content. This could be a sudden change from the spirit of sacrament meeting. You also need to delete the recording of the meeting that You Tube automatically saves.
Conclusion
I really like the church webcast system. I like how it keeps you in the "branding" and sprit of the church. Unfortunately, each broadcast must be scheduled. I know some stakes just create a broadcast for each building each week. Still, there is no recurring broadcast, so you would need to schedule and disseminate the streaming URL and stream Id to people in every unit every week (another alternative is to call a bunch of people as assistant stake technology specialists and then teach them to log in and find the streaming info for their building).
With You Tube, we can have one account for each building. We're using the Mevo device and if you're logged in to your You Tube account from the Mevo app, it's incredibly easy to start a stream. You can stream to the church webcast system from a Mevo as well, but it involves copying and pasting the URL and stream Id. The stake presidency wants this to be simple and not require a significant amount of technical expertise. The ease of the Mevo app makes the You Tube solution rank higher. If the church webcast system had a way to do a recurring webcast and it used the same URL/stream Id for each occurrence (and the Mevo app lets you save it), it might level the playing field. If you're not using a Mevo, some of the factors we considered may not be important.
Someone is considering embedding the You Tube steam in a web page so that we might be able to remove ourselves a little bit from the You Tube branding. Whatever we do, we'll create a tiny URL to more easily disseminate the viewing link to church members. I guess we'll figure out next Sunday how well everything works.
