On November 24th and 25th we had two very good meetings of “viewers”, 26 people in all, and a variety of useful ideas and contacts came out of them. Here are some of the main ones:
Our streaming can be accessed directly through our website, but not many people use that. We need to decide whether to continue it – one problem is that the sound can be out of sync with the picture.
There are 14 leaflets for different kinds of ordinary Saints’ days and we have been trying to work out how to put them on our website. One participant gave a useful suggestion, and we’ll try that.
There wasn’t a lot of support for the use we have made of multiple cameras, giving different views of the service. One participant said he preferred it to feel as if he were sitting in one place, with the same one view, as if he were there. We’ll try that, while continuing to focus on the altar for the 2nd half of the Eucharist, and other special occasions when it’s good to see close up what is going on. We’ll try also to give a closer view of preachers, so that those hard of hearing can lip-read, though that is a bit more difficult to do.
There was a suggestion to produce an introductory video on YouTube explaining to people how to get the best out of our streaming.
Many people would like an occasional meditation on an artwork, and there was a suggestion to do one for Advent.
It was wondered whether we could start the camera is a little earlier, rather than plunging in at the last minute – we’ll see what we can do, although sometimes we inevitably get there at the last minute.
We discussed the problem of streaming attracting people from going to their parish church – on the whole it didn’t seem something to worry about unduly at the moment.
We heard of a wide variety of needs and situations that our streaming meets, and an appreciation for the opportunity in these meetings to meet one another and have a discussion. We aired quite a lot more other things, but these were the main conclusions that emerged. Many thanks to everybody! It will be good to do this exercise again at some point.