Father Jake and the Pandemic of 2020: How One Church in Fort Wayne Spread God’s Word to the Faithful

Due to the Coronavirus outbreak, nearly every church in America had been faced with the challenge of reaching their congregations while maintaining a safe distance. But how do you preach to a group of people when having your congregants in front of you is both unsafe and in in some locales illegal? Here’s how Father Jake from the Cathedral of Immaculate Conception was able to jump 2020’s tallest hurdle and deliver God’s Word to the people of Fort Wayne, Indiana.

Fr. Jake’s mission was to build a live streaming setup at Immaculate Conception so he could speak to churchgoers at the convenience and safety of their homes. The setup needed to be easy enough for one or two volunteers to operate while he performed the church service. But there was one obstacle – a scholar in the word of God is not always an expert in the ways of video production and Internet technology. To accomplish this, turned to Ed Govin from Advanced Systems Group, a local AV systems integrator in Fort Wayne.

With Mr. Govin's background in broadcast engineering, he knew the perfect solution to help Fr. Jake reach his goal. By combining Datavideo’s KMU-200 Switcher with a 4K PTZ Camera, he was able give him a high-quality, 4-angle live-streaming production setup that has been easy enough for his church volunteers to operate. They simply used the touch-screen interface or the built-in joystick to select four regions of interest on the monitor. Then, they used the buttons on the lower-right area of the KMU-200 to choose which region would go live to the Internet using the built-in streaming encoder.

Moreover, the compact package took up very little table space, which added to the convenience of the experience, and the single-cable technology of the camera meant that mounting the camera in the church would be super-simple and tidy.

“We just finished using the KMU-200 to stream last Sunday’s mass on Facebook for about an hour. Once Facebook found the stream, that was it. No problems!” – Father Jake

Since then, Fr. Jake has live-streamed a small wedding using the KMU-200, which was operated by one of the young guests. Because the KMU-200 is so easy to use, the boy only needed little training in order to switch the various camera angles on the unit.

Fr. Jake and his community volunteers have gone on to live-stream church services from Immaculate Conception to the local community in Fort Wayne, and beyond. The beauty of live streaming is that it not only reclaims your lost audience – it increases your potential reach many-times over.