On Demand Services
I was intrigued by a post over at Tim’s Blog, and I thought I would write a little about it here as well. Tim found and used the term “Godcasting”, which I don’t particularly like, I think because it reminds me of the term typecasting more than podcasting, and I don’t like the thouht of typecasting God. Anyway, the term I came up with is On Demand Services. Now, this would in no way be a substitute for going to a real service at church, but for those times when you’re traveling and can’t make it to church, or are maybe wanting to introduce someone to a service without going to one (keeping the comfort level up, as some people are really nervous about going to church for some reason), or just to hear a really good service or sermone once again – I think the idea has some promise. At my church right now, we have CD sales, DVD sales, and some videos on our website, but it would be nice to have a podcasting style feed that updated after every service for those that are away for extended periods of time, or just want to see what’s going on at First Apostolic. I think I’ll look into the possibility a bit closer, storing things on my machines at first to see what kind of space requirements we need to do what we want, and see how many hits we get!
Joe, I completely agree about the term “Godcasting”. If not for other reasons, I dislike it simply because it sounds like you’re using God as bait in a fishing tournament. I have not come up with a name for it on our church site, which needs a revamp. I am in the same situation about the format and size. I began to upload our podcast mp3’s (mono, CD quality, ~30MB or 1 MB/minute) and I decided to look up our space constraint. We only get 50MB and 1 GB of transfer each month. I probably exceeded both last night. I did not sign us up for the host we are on, and now I am really feeling the need to go off that site and onto something a little more dynamic and roomy. Joe, I know you’re reselling hosting, and maybe we can work something out for the church. It’s a low volumne site at the moment and I know we could move at least the 10 bucks a month we spend your way. If not, maybe you know of a good host who can do a MySQL/PHP setup with at least half a gig of storage and a couple gig’s a month transfer. Like I said, we’re low volume at the moment, but we’re going to need the site to be able to grow with us. We offer the CD’s of our service for visitors and members alike at no cost, and we really want to do the same for our online guests.