Unfortunately, this hasn’t always been easy for Russell. “With our previous streaming solution, probably once a week we would have one of the locations drop out, and in our case a drop-out would either mean switch to a backup message that was a video file that we would send to those campuses or it would entail a campus pastor having to get up on stage and try and preach a message that he’s never spoken before.” Sam Lesky, Executive Pastor of Campus Operations (formerly Campus Pastor), describes how this type of interruption has a great effect on the audience. “The hard part is . . . it sends a lull over the congregation. The whole congregation freezes,” he notes.

The first time using the platform, Russell knew it was the answer that Seacoast needed. “I tried to pick the worst possible environments that we have, one of them being a fishing Village of about 500 people with a really poor DSL connection,” states Russell. Experiencing no interruptions and crystal-clear video and audio playback at the campus, he explains that he “came back to leadership and said, ‘hey I think this is the product we should consider’.”

Pleased with the results of the testing, Seacoast promptly replaced the streaming systems at all locations. Lesky describes, “it is absolutely amazing the difference we have.” Along with being ensured a completely resilient playback given a short delay, Russell explains, “one of the biggest things we’ve seen from an attendee perspective at our campuses is the lack of freezing or smearing or digital distortion that we would see in other streaming solutions that we tried at our campuses.” Without having to worry about multisite streaming reliability, quality, or connection drop-outs, Russell, Lesky, and others are freed up to spend their time working on more important ministry tasks. As Lesky states, “That we’re not stressing over the satellite locations or production of the video . . . we can get better at what we do on Sunday morning as a church. It has been an extremely smooth operation with Living as One.”