Last I talked to the Northpoint guys, they were pretty adamently opposed to the idea of a LIVE stream. They like for each of their campuses to have the freedom to be a week behind or have their campus pastors teach on occasion. Unless they’ve changed their delivery method in the last few months, their capturing an HD center and SD sides striaght to hard drives and hand delivering hard drives to their campuses for playback in Pro Video Sync by renewed vision.

I have been around the Calvary Chapel Fort Lauderdale church for some time and they are now using an almost identical technology. They broadcast an HD center and SD side images live over a Bellsouth fiber connection. I have witnessed the presentation and they do a great job.

I am specifically talking about my experience at the Boca Raton location, but they are doing very similar with their other 2 satellite locations as well. I have spoken with their video engineer at the Boca Raton location and know they are very willing to help.

Their address is http://www.calvaryftl.org/ . You may need to talk to the campus pastor at the Boca location, Jerry Sander, to be directed to the right guy to talk shop with.

When we first started, satellite caused all kinds of sync issues with decode rates between the HD “virtual pastor” shot and the SD “imag” shots on side screens. Syncing the signals LIVE was a beast of a task, but we eventually got them locked in with each other. We used that video model for about a year until this past summer.

We’ve since abandoned the “virtual pastor” shot because we wanted the ability to time shift our services with a glorified “TIVO” option. It’s obviously very difficult and expensive to capture and time shift an HD and SD stream simultaneously. Although, the technology IS out there for doing two streams… I personally researched every option out there and have all the specs of different devices if you guys are ever interested in time shifting.

Our newest venture that we’re playing with is bidirectional video for a huge baptism event we’re having at all of our places in October. All of our campuses will be able to see each other as we do baptisms at the same time. Should be fun if everything goes as planned!

but Woodmen Valley Chapel has two campus, has a band in each in which each of the worship leaders take turns leading the other campus… meaning… the band is live in both places, with the worship leaders and their instruments being fed to both campuses. so they are singing together and harmonies etc… pretty cool…
don’t know if that is what you are looking for. but i thought it was cool.

Keep up the good work!

Thanks,
George