 So again, good evening everyone. My name is Deacon Eric Elly. I am your digital minister for the Southern New England Conference of the United Church of Christ. I'm seeing some familiar, a lot of familiar faces, some new faces. This evening is a special evening. Tonight we have with us Andy Mann from Alter Live. So welcome, Andy. Thank you so much for joining us this evening. To give a little room for folks who may be a little late, running a little behind, with a 30 second time limit, let's go around and introduce ourselves so that we know who we are. At least the folks who regularly attend the Tech Deacons roundtable to know who we are. We know each other. We have some new faces this evening and we also have Andy. So I introduce myself. I'm the digital minister of the Southern New England Conference. Deb, would you like to go next? Sure. I am a Tech Deacon at Wilberham United Church in Wilberham, Massachusetts. Thank you. Thank you, Deb. Lori. I am Lori Russell. I am on the Deacon at Hope Church in East Providence, Rhode Island. Thank you, Lori. Rich Harrington. I'm the vice moderator at the Center Congressional Church in Manchester and we did our first live worship service with in-person people last Sunday. We finally made it there with all our internet connections. Oh, cool. I'd like to hear about that later on. Randall, you're next on my screen at least. I'm Randy Glenn Denning at the First Congregational Church of Ridgefield. I'm on the IT team. Thank you for joining us, Randy. Thank you. Thanks so much. Richard Conley. I'm Richard Conley from Leverett Congregational Church in Massachusetts and I'm one of the Techs. Thank you. Thank you, Rich. Edie. I'm Edie Steele, the Minister of First Congregational Church of Griswold in the rural part of the Far Eastern side of Connecticut. Thank you, Edie. Larry, you would be next. Thank you. Larry. Larry Harris and I'm with the Wilberham United Church and I chair the Technology Committee. Thank you, Larry. Eric? Thank you, Larry. Sam? I'm the Head Deacon at First Church, Griswold with Pastor Edie and I'm liking to learn stuff. Trying to learn stuff. That's what we're here for. Jane, you're next. Hi, Bob from First Congregational in Gardner, Mass. I am the Tech Administrator, is my official title now. Used to be just a tech volunteer. Oh, nice. Congratulations. Mike Higgins, would you care to introduce yourself? Mike Higgins, Deacon at First Congregational Church, Griswold with Sam and Pastor Edie. Thank you, Mike. Hi, I'm on the Digital Ministry team at the First Church of Christ in Mansfield Center, Connecticut. Oh, nice. Isn't there a drive-through in Mansfield? There is. There is a drive-in movie. There you go. There's a double feature every night. There you go. Bob, can you introduce yourself next, please? Who did you go for? What's that? Who's next? Oh, you are. Oh, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. All right. I was kind of watching the faces on the screen and jumped out of the sequencer. I'm with the First Congregational Church in Ridgefield, Connecticut, part of the IT team. Thank you, Bob. Tom Manito, you're next. Yeah, I'm Tom Manito over at First Congregational Church in Bristol, Connecticut, and I'm part of the tech team along with part of the music committee. Okay. Thank you, Tom. And at least on my screen to the right of Tom is Second Kong. Don't know. Yeah, that's me, David. Hi, David. Good. Thank you. How are you, Eric? And everybody, I'm David Brandt from Second Congregational Church in Beverly, Mass. I'm just a member. I'm kind of like trying to run everything for the new minister and we're making it, but it's very difficult. No such thing as just a member. Yes. Ever. Okay. And I believe Deb, you did go. Deb Hubble, correct? Okay. And for folks who don't have video on, Phillip. Sorry, my wife was printing to our office computer. My children are running around. I start my video in a second. I am Phil Bowdenstab here in Ridge Shield, Connecticut. I work alongside of Bob and I thought I saw Randy on there. Part of a subgroup formed by our trustees committee last year, really to accelerate our kind of digital streaming program. And if there's one, I guess in a cruel way, good thing that came with this program is that it really accelerated our need to come up with a platform to allow congregants to not only interact with us during the pandemic, but also plan for the next couple of years ahead of how can our church, much like a lot of other churches, reach out to our community, reach out to our friends and invite them in to experience worship and other programming over the course of a church calendar year. And to maybe make a migration from Zoom and explore some other pathways and we're pleased, Eric, to get the email from you a couple of weeks back on this new provider. And it sounds like it answers a lot of the potential needs that we're looking for as a church. So joining this evening to learn more and conversant with you all. So thanks again for helping to set this up. Yeah, no problem. Thank you so much, Phillip. Samuel, perhaps Samuel had walked away from his computer. Would you like to introduce yourself? Hi everybody. I'm sorry I was a little late. I had to leave a meeting to get here late for a meeting, but I'm happy to be here. And looking forward to see what we got on the agenda tonight. Love these meetings. I'm from the Rockland Church, the first congregation church in Rockland. I don't know what else to say. We're glad you're here. Okay, good. So at this point, thank you all for introducing yourself. It gives at least it gives us a chance to, to get to know each other. And it also gives Andy an idea of, you know, the, the breadth and the depth of the conference of the Southern New England conference. And with that, I turned it over to Andy at this time. Well, thanks Eric. And thanks for all the introductions. Phillip, I must say the, I got kicked out of my kitchen. Cause my daughter's cooking dinner. And that was more important than this call. And, and then I haven't yet had the obligatory dog bark, but I'm sure that's coming. And actually I have a really good story about dogs in church. If we get time to it. Yeah. So I'm, I live in Boston, actually a one town, two towns over Arlington. So Arlington, Cambridge, Boston, Arlington, Cambridge and then Boston, right? But I recognize a lot of the towns that you mentioned. I've, I've worked in, I worked in Manchester. I think you were saying Manchester, New Hampshire. And I spent many years in Connecticut. So Griswold and Bristol and those, those are my afraid they're just towns I drove through. I didn't go to the drive-in movie either. But I'm familiar with, with, with this whole area. I've lived here almost my whole life. I lived in Washington DC as a student, but that was the rest of the time I've been here in Southern New England. And thank you, Eric, for the invitation. Eric and I got together about a month, a month and a half ago or so. And he already knew more about altar and altar live than, than, than I thought he would. And so he was way ahead of me. I had to, I had to catch up to his speed. So what I'd like to do today this evening is talk a little bit of a glimpse of, of the product, talk about why we built it, about the kind of problem we're trying to solve our attack and some of the experience that we've had so far. I, I like to talk in a lot of stories. So I'll give you some more stories that hopefully have some purpose to them besides the entertainment value. And whatever kind of questions you have about, how have churches tried to implement things? It doesn't necessarily have to be about altar live, but about digital ministry in general. Any technical things about the product that I can answer, I'd be happy to. And so I'll let, I'll drive a little bit and then, then you guys can all drive. All right, let me talk about altar live. So we are born of COVID. The company got started around April, May of 2020. It started out really just helping some local churches getting, getting their live stream act together. And actually at the time, everyone said, well, next month, when we're, some of us are back in the church. So everyone was thinking June, maybe about half of us would get back in the church and half would be at home. How are we going to bring those two bifurcated segments of the of the congregation back together? We don't want folks being left behind, having insiders and outsiders, that kind of thing. So we started building something for that. If you want to hear about that, I can tell you what it is, but we never finished it because by August, all of those same churches were saying, we don't think we're going back. So now what we, we've gotten pretty good at live streaming, but we want more. We want, it's a little, and we started to hear this word engagement, right? We would like more engagement. And so if you're doing things on Facebook or on YouTube, especially the engagement was mostly, you know, hit the like button or say something in the chat. There's not a lot of depth to chat. There's a lot of hello and what's your favorite pizza topping and that kind of thing. And, and then maybe sharing and things like that. But it wasn't, it really, it was a pale, a pale shadow of being in person with people. On zoom, you had great engagement. You could see everybody, at least you could see their names on the, on the screen. They're, then you've all, I'm sure you experienced whatever the, the shortcomings of zoom are. But for me, I'm a talker. So when you get a crowd like this, I think there's like 20 or 24 of us here. You get, you know, if it's wide open, you get three or four who talk a lot. And everybody else doesn't talk. They try to talk, but it's, it's a little hard to break in. And then of course there's the, the issues with mute and things like that. So it's, I love zoom and I have, you actually use zoom love for years before the, before the pandemic. I think zoom is the best I used to be in the collaboration business. I said video conferencing will never, ever, ever, ever work. And then I saw zoom like, wow, they really have cracked the code. And I think they saved the world. And, you know, as short of the vaccine, I think the zoom was probably the best thing that, that we had during the pandemic. At any rate, we built something where people were saying what we'd like to do is we would like to be able to see each other. I don't want to have to listen to everybody else, which is not a negative thing. It's just like, I want to sit with my two or three or four people who I, I know and love, and I sit with them during the service. And then I also chat with people afterwards during the coffee hour, something like that. So we said about, we shifted gears and we started to build something that met those requirements. And the result is ultra-live. It came out around December, about the first week of December last year, about 700 churches have, have created what we call a community and they've done something, you know, they've run a service on ultra-live. So we've learned a lot from those who have used it. We also learned from those who have stopped using it and what, what they would like, what's the gap between being able to use it going further. We've learned a lot about where zoom ends and where, where ultra-live might begin and where Facebook and YouTube end and where ultra-live might, might fit. Sometimes it's described as if, if YouTube and zoom got married and had a baby, that would be ultra-live, right? I don't know if that's a, an uncomfortable comparison or metaphor or not. But what we do is we take live streaming, which might be just the, whatever the live streaming solution that you're using now. And we combine it with video conferencing, very similar to what you experience here in zoom. And we put those two things together. So I'll enter into a church service, right? And online and I'll see that there's a live stream. I'll also see a seating chart and then I pick a row. I might pick an empty row or I might pick one that's full of people. And now when I sit there, I can see the two or three or four people that I'm sitting with in a, in very much like a zoom environment. And we're watching the live stream and we can now also be in conversation with each with each other. And depending on how interactive or dynamic or what kind of, what kind of pauses are built into the church service. We can actually have some meaningful discussion about the message or about what's going on in our lives or, you know, how, how, what sort of impact the music has had on us. And then afterwards we move out of from that auditorium space into what we call the lobby where now I'm with the same people, but I can kind of mix and mingle and go around to different tables and kind of keep in touch with the people in my community. So that is, that's the, that's what we set up to build. We've got the basics of it. And then we have to hit a lot of the fine points too. Sometimes it only takes a small speed bump to kind of throw everybody off. So there's quite a bit to get right in the product. And so what I'll do, I have some, what I like to call my, their baby pictures. I've just got four slides where I'll show, here's what the live stream look like. Here's what the lobby looks like and a couple of other things. But let me pause because some of you may have come with questions already and I want to make sure that I address them. So I'll just, if people want to raise their hands or just speak up, that'd be fine. And I'll just wait a polite 10 seconds and then go to, and I'll be able to share my screen Eric, right? All right. A couple of questions. So when you enter, you have to log, is there a login process or you just enter straight in? All right, that's great. I'll show that on the screen. That's a anonymous person. And actually what happens is the system assigns you a pseudonym. Yep. And if you want, then if you want, and you can see the live stream, you can see who else is there. And you have a limited amount of chatting that you can do with anyone. But when you log in, then you can chat with anyone who's there and you can join the seat and have video conferencing, but you do need to log in to get the interact. So I pick up you and I said, you said I see two or three people around me. This is the virtual world, right? You'll see a seating chart. So like if you ever bought tickets for, you know, going into a movie or something like that, you'll see a seating chart. You'll actually see who's sitting in each seat. You see the virtual people. You see the virtual person. And then during the service you can communicate, talk to them. Yes, you can. Yes. But not anybody else other than those two or three. If you move from that row and pick another row, you can talk to other people in that row, but yes, that's right. Okay. Do it in typically do that. If you know, there's a lot of things you can do online that you would never do in the physical building. Yep. Okay. You rarely would get up out of your pew or seat and row and go sit somewhere else right there in the middle of the service, but it is. No one would really know you were doing it and all your life. Okay. All right. Great. Thanks. Thanks Bob. So I have some follow up questions to that. If somebody comes in who's anonymous. We can greet them. Is that correct? Yes. It depends on who we is. Is the answer is. So Randall on that one is the. You can appoint greeters. And the greeters then can interact with the, with an anonymous person. The rest and vice versa. Yeah. Everybody else though, does not communicate with the anonymous person and also vice versa there. You have to log in for that. Is that so. A verbal or through the chat window. That is through text-based chat. So I logged in. I logged into a church. And I got a name assigned to me. It was something. I can't remember what it was, but it wasn't a person's name. It was something like. Right. But I could see that name in the list. There were 200 people in the list. And I could always see my name. I was identified as anonymous. And I could see some people. Who had joined. But I think had not checked in. And then I saw a third group. That were quote checked in. Yeah. And I couldn't do much. So I had to log in. So I had to log in. So I had to log in. Unless I logged in on this particular case. I chose not to. To create a log in and so forth and so on. You are describing exactly as we intended it to work. And I hope that was intuitive for you. So I was in the cartoon. Church. Oh, at Elim church in Saskatchewan. Yeah. Yeah. Big church 1400 seats. Beautiful looking church. A little bigger than probably most of us. A little bit bigger. Randall, did you have a follow up? Yeah, a couple. At the end of our service, we like to offer prayer partners for those who. Want some private prayer. And I assume there's something like a breakout room. For that. Randall, I'm so glad you're here. Yes. So that actually is one of the main design points for us. So in the lobby, and I'll show you when we get there. In the lobby, there are different, there's a series of tables and you can name a table that says this table is for prayer. And you join that table because you're looking for prayer. And there might be some as someone who's assigned for intercessory prayer. That is already sitting at that table. You might have multiple tables. So if I want to pray with a man or if I want to pray with a woman or maybe some of my age or something like that, I can already see who's at that table. And I'm going to pick, I'm going to pick the table with Randall. And nothing against you Deb, but I'm not going to your table for prayer. Right. So, and then we would sit there and then obviously we'd have face to face audio, visual, and just a more intimate time of prayer for that right now. All of the tables have the same number of seats. It's four seats. It's no more than four seats and it's no fewer than four seats. So the no fewer part is, well, all right, if I'm going to meet with you and I want to talk about my addiction, I really don't want someone popping into the table and saying, like, Hey, how's it, how are you doing guys? It's, you know, the Patriots are playing today and like, Oh, well, go away. So very soon actually we'll have two seated tables, three seated tables as well as four seated tables. Then the other thing, which is bigger because every single church says this is, do you have any tables that are larger than four? And the answer to that is no, I don't have any tables that are larger than four. So I'm going to talk about that today. We will, but not, not soon soon. That's just a, I'm going to get into the technology a little bit later if, if anyone's interested, but there are just some technology constraints about adding more than four to a table. Some reliability and stability starts to, starts to kick in, especially if someone's got kind of a low powered, like an old computer or compromised bandwidth, not because they're remote and don't have a lot of bandwidth. So like, I'm in my, I'm actually in my bedroom instead of the kitchen. So occasionally I, my wifi is not as great here, but also if you're, you've got competition in your houses or people are using the internet and someone's watching Netflix on their phone or something like that, that your, your bandwidth gets limited. So in order to accommodate all sorts of computing types and, and bandwidth limitations, we need to do something else to go beyond four. So the answer is there's four at a table. And shortly there'll be private for two, and then also larger tables for things like small groups. To go to a table, correct? Yes, Bob. I'm going to give you one more. Do you have to be logged in question? Yes. Yeah. To go to a table, you do need to be logged in. That is correct. Yeah. And one prayer is over. You can go to fellowship or leave the service. That's correct. Yes, Randall. Yes. And the final question is during this period of transition and doing hybrid, some of our presenters, like for a pulpit moment or reading, maybe remote rather than in the sanctuary. Does altar allow for that? That. So what you just described, Randall, is what altar as a company set out to solve. In May and June of last year, which is how do we beam people from home into the church, especially if they're, they've got a participatory role, reading or singing or offering a prayer or something. So that people in the church can see, you know, we don't want to exclude the people at home. And vice versa, everything that's going on in the church can also be beamed, you know, back into everybody's living room. So I am sure that that hybrid situation is what all many of you are moving into as COVID is rounding the, the final corner here. But no, that is not that, that we, we shelved that product, which I really should call a project. We didn't really finish it. We will take it off the shelf again, but probably not until late this year. Right. So that was our initial hope. But then once every single church was telling us, that's not really what we want. I think that's the first time I've said that number. I think that the, the, the, what you've described will be the norm for a lot of people. Any other questions? Like YouTube, because he hit different audiences and that type of stuff. And I know there's different solutions out there and everything, but I couldn't quite make out from your website, whether like, do you act as that middleman in the streets? I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. Maybe if you act as that middleman in the streaming or, you know, or somebody like, how, like, can you provide that type of solution? Or is that that we just slew this and then you like hook into that somehow. I'm not sure how that works. All right. Let me, let me translate just for everybody. There was a little scratchy at the beginning when you were saying so, what most churches do today with, with Walter live is since they're all, they probably already before they ever heard of us, they were already streaming. streaming to Facebook or streaming to YouTube, and maybe doing two or more of those. There's some other solutions out there. There's this thing called church online. A lot of churches use the larger size churches. So since churches are already streaming, what we do to make it a little easier for whoever one of the tech team is doing it, is like just take the stream that you've already got going on Facebook and on YouTube, copy that link and put it into AlterLive and that will just be another one that receives that. We have had a lot of requests that people could, that churches could stream directly to AlterLive rather than having to go through a medium like YouTube or Facebook for whatever reasons. And so that is something that we're building. So I'll try to, I've worked in software my whole life and we always say, oh, that's coming, right? I just want to try to be as clear as I can of what we don't have. And then what I was saying with Eric when we met, we have sort of our short-term roadmap and that's things we're almost positive about for the next, in the next 30 days where we'll be. So when I say something, I'll try to say if it's in that 30-day window, if it's beyond that, then it's kind of like the next 90 days after that. So that would bring us to the end of summer. And then there's anything beyond that, which really means we've thought about it and talked about it and it's on a whiteboard somewhere but it's important anyway. So what, the ability to stream directly from whatever streaming software you've got into Alter Live, that's something in the 30-day window. And then with that rebroadcast of Facebook or to and or a YouTuber, is that just going to be basically at Alter Live? All right, but within the 30 days, it'll be for Alter Live. Okay. So if you run that in the 90-day timeframe, then using Alter Live, using basically us as the point where you could go to multiple sites, yeah. Okay, cool, thank you. All right. Okay, what I'm gonna do is I'm going to share my screen. Couldn't find the button at first. All right, this is a view of Alter Live, right? So what would happen for the people in your congregation is they would receive a link. It would either be on your website or in an email that you send to them. They click on the link and this is where they would come and they would see the live stream, right? So just as if they were watching on YouTube or Facebook. And then what you see over here is all of the people who are there. So when Bob was talking about the church that he went to, he got to see all of the names of the people who are there. Now on Zoom, that's what you already have, right? On YouTube and on Facebook, you'll see that there's maybe, I can see that there's 35 people there or 75 people who are watching, but you don't know who they are. And are they the same people who were there last week or are they new people this week? There's really no way to tell until somebody actually enters something into the chat, in which case now their name is revealed to everyone. So in Alter Live, when you get here, as soon as you get here, your name or the name that you're assigned is here in the list. And so one of the nice things that I find and what I hear from a lot of churches is even if someone doesn't pick a seat, which you'll see later when I don't sit down in a row and I have a video chat with somebody, it's just nice to see who's there, right? I kind of compare it to sitting in the back row at church, like I can just see everybody there. I'm with my people. There's just a real warming sense of wholeness when I see that. So this is something that we've heard from quite a few that they really like to see the list here. I'm gonna click and zoom in on that list for a second. So these are the same names there from that list. And you'll see that there's CJ Brown. He's a greeter. I'll talk about greeters in a second. Chris Cortez, Irene Knot, Jason Edwards. But then you see these odd names. And I'm sure Bob got one of these. beige, skunk, coffee jackal, which is my personal favorite, orange hedgehog. So usually it's a color and an animal. So when you come in, if you haven't logged in, you're assigned a pseudonym. So now I can see that there are people, they may be longtime members of your church, could be the person who lives with you, just hasn't logged in. But it also might be someone who's just checking your church out. So Chris Cortez cannot speak with beige, skunk, or with coffee jackal. However, CJ Brown, who is a greeter and Irene Knot, their greeter, they can actually initiate a conversation. So for those of you who are streaming to YouTube or Facebook, you know how, I don't know if it's frustrating, but certainly you're not capable of knowing that there's a newcomer there and then initiating a conversation. You actually have to kind of urge them or somehow lure them into revealing their presence. And then you're like, oh, that's a new person. And then hopefully in a very constructive way, tagging them and saying, oh, is there anything, can I introduce you to anyone? Or can I tell you about the church or maybe we'd meet after or something like that. So that's stood on its head here. Here, CJ Brown, when he sees someone who's anonymous can actually initiate that conversation. And it's through text-based chat and just say, oh, hi, do you need any help or are you new here? And of course, if it's someone who's been there for a while, they're like, no, it's me, it's Deb. You know, like, oh, okay Deb, well, if you log in, you'll be able to do more stuff when you get here. So that's something that people seem to appreciate that you don't have to wait for the newcomer to initiate conversation. I'm going to pause for a second. So one of the reasons we do that is, or the reason we do that I should say is it's a balance of accessibility and security. So we all have heard of Zoom bombing and I hope none of you have ever had to experience it. I have never experienced it myself, but just allowing anybody to come in and then expose themselves or say whatever disruptive thing and it may not be nefarious, but someone who really doesn't belong there at this time, maybe they are having a bad day. So the only way you're actually that someone enters that they're able to interact with anyone else is if they log in and now there's a degree of control. So first of all, they have to show who they are. The way you log in is with your Google ID or with your Facebook ID or with your email. And if they do become disruptive, the greeters have the ability to dismiss someone from the event. And when they're dismissed, they can't come back in and they actually cannot come back in ever, right? So unless the administrator re-admits them, right? So if they try to show up again the next Sunday, unless they came in with another identity, they would not be able to come back in. But once you've logged in, now you have access to all of the interactive features. So that's how, that was the balance that we struck, especially early on in the churches we were talking to, actually had been using Zoom. That was a big, big question. Like how do we prevent that from happening? I will say we still get questions from churches or I should say requests because some of them do find that when someone is logged in, they are a little bit too chatty in the chat or the things that they're saying are inappropriate, not bad inappropriate, but just kind of like you're a distraction to the rest of the congregation. And so is there a way for the greeters to moderate the chat a little bit and kind of slow someone down like they can only post once every five minutes or can you delete something that they've posted or can you prevent someone from posting again for a while? So there's still a need for greater granularity in that type of relationship between exit stability and openness and security. So those are, it's a moving target. Hopefully it's not too wildly moving, but that's the whole thought process behind the pseudonyms and the anonymous access. The questions about that, Bob, I know you have a question. I told you, I have one more question about logging in. I don't think this was a login question. It's a comment, only a comment, no question. When I joined the church in Skatoon, my, since I did not log in and I got one of those colorful names, it was separate, there were three categories. And under that category, I forget exactly what it was called, but it was clear I was a visitor and had not logged in. So you had those anonymous in your list, right? Intermixed with others in the, and I don't know whether that's an option or not, but we were in three groups, members who had logged in, others who had logged in that weren't members, I think. And then there was me by myself since I was the only one that ventured that far north on Sunday. But you've got a great memory too. All right, so there are three, visually three things. Your name is always at the top, right? Whether you're anonymous name or whatever. Okay, so that's why I'm at the top. That's one category, category of one person. The next one is everyone who is not seated and then the next group is everyone who actually has taken a seat, which is helpful because if you are looking for someone to sit with, you might want to skip past the people who are not seated and look at the list of people who are seated. All right, I'm still get one more, Bobbler, don't worry, I'll keep a bonus on that. I didn't use up my login. Do you have a room? I'm listening. I believe Edie, did Edie, did you have your hand raised? Yeah, I have a really, really big question. I think, is this for people who are in church or everyone is remote? So this is for people who are online. Okay, so, oh, okay. But you could have people at church, it's just that online people are the only ones that access this. That's correct, that's correct. And I would say that I haven't seen anything in Alter Live, nor can I imagine it without thinking really, really hard of a way to have anyone who's in the building to also be online. The reason is there's a lot of feedback that's about to kick in. That's the first reason. But like I said earlier, I think a lot of you are probably either already or just about to have some in the building and some at home. And bridging that gap is gonna be one of the next really important things for churches in terms of their online access. I don't have a good answer for you. Just did I say 2022? They're now said it twice. That's probably something at the end of this year or early next year that we'll be looking at because that was the thing that we looked at first. So we already have a lot of thoughts about how to do it. We've got some technology. It was probably version 0.5 technology. So we can't just take it off the shelf and then throw it out there. We'll have to rethink it a little bit. Would you have a, I'm sorry, would you have a latency issue also when interacting with people who are in church watching live and then watching what stream since you got a, even on YouTube, you might have, we find there's at least a 10 second latency issue. Facebook might be a little more. There's some latency. And like I said, we've probably deployed it in about five churches and there were all sorts of problems. So latency was probably one of them. So there's quite a, like, this is why I'm saying it would probably be till next year. And we'd have to see is latency, is it tolerable? Is it noticeable or is it, you know, is it something that's a, you know, if you don't fix that, then you don't have a solution. How do you get something like prayer requests over to your minister? I know our minister actually, we, we dual stream to YouTube and to Facebook and we either have someone watching that and texting the minister or the minister's actually got a feed to both and watching comments coming through. Well, whoever that minister is, he or she, pretty good if they can keep their eye on monitor and two monitors or not many, and the congregation and still be prayerful. I want to know. It has been used in that scenario that you've talked about, not a lot though, but people use the chat, they'll use chat. So it's the same way they would do on YouTube. Okay. People enter in the chat. I have seen a couple of customers who have twisted things very cleverly so that the pastor can join a row of people and then everybody else can see the pastor in the row with those people and can hear what he or she is saying and they're smarter than me. I don't know how they got it to work that way without all kinds of crazy feedback. But if they can do it, then certainly we can do it. So I actually, I was at a church watching it happen once and I invited our chief technology officer to come in and he was quite, I think at first he was angry but then he was quite intrigued. Like how did he do that? And should he be able to do that? Is he gonna break it? But what you described there is probably part of how we would try to do that hybrid. Some are in the building and some are online. Andy, I believe Deb Hubbell has her hand raised. All right, Deb. Thanks. I guess it's not really a question but more of a comment to piggyback on what Edie brought forward about hybrid worship because I'm gonna say we're at least half in person and half online. Maybe it's even two thirds in person at this point. And so you already mentioned the feedback issue but then thinking about the people who are in person and sucking up all your bandwidth on the wifi. But then if I'm the worship leader, I'm not sure I wanna see all those people sitting in the pews looking at their devices to interact with everybody around them. So I guess that's just my comment for you for future development. Yeah, there are gonna be a lot of technology issues and probably more human issues. Humans are always harder to solve. I do know that there are people who look at their phones now during the service. They're called teenagers. And this pastor. Because we collect comments and prayer concerns and we ask people where they're, I forget who in the chat in our meeting tonight said it, but we prompt people like where are you joining us from? What's your favorite color? That sort of thing. Yeah. Can I use my online Bible? Yes, yes. There you go. The pastors in my church say, when we read scripture, they're like, please follow along in your own Bible or in your mobile app and acknowledge that people have it. Yeah. So in terms of, I just like to say that, so I work in IC, so when I wired up the router and gateways in my church, I specifically made sure that the wifi for people in it have, there's a bandwidth limit. So like the, and then on top of that, the live stream itself is hardwired and just takes priority over everything. Yeah. So I'm lucky that we're at, we have ample upload speeds, but that's why I also like advocated that if we ever did run into any problems you can request to, you know, if it's affordable to be able to, you know, to upgrade the upload, the internet, you know, package for churches and things for that reason. Yeah. And I see, I also see that David has his hand raised. Yes, thank you. This product sounds like a great hybrid solution, but like Zoom, I've experienced with starting hybrid services in our church that a lot of people are now complaining about the music quality and the sound that they're hearing of the organ or piano or people singing in the church. It just doesn't sound the same like when I feed the music directly from VMIX into Facebook or YouTube, it sounds way better. Is that the same kind of thing like with Zoom or, you know, you guys, what? I think what you're talking about there is ambient sound. So if it's on Zoom and you have a microphone, right? I mean, I've listened to church services, especially, you know, like in a big cathedral or something like that, boy, in the cathedral it's beautiful and online is terrible, right? And I mean, you just, you get echo that doesn't belong there, right? And even in a nice intimate chapel with good acoustics when that just comes into the microphone, unless the microphone's really great, you know, it's not gonna work that well. But I don't think that has anything to do with, because were you pre-recording before? Is that what you were? Yes, some of it was pre-recorded. However, we're trying to go live now that we're trying to do Zoom and more hybrid services. It's just difficult. It just sounds, a lot of people are saying on Zoom, it sounds way different than when I heard everything on YouTube and Facebook. Yeah, yeah. I think that has to do with whether it was pre-mixed or not. And I do know that on Zoom, Zoom compresses the heck out of sound. And there is a feature that you can turn on in Zoom called turn on original sound. Oh, I know what you're talking about. So if you turn on original sound, know that you will get the fidelity, but you won't get like the same fidelity you would get in Facebook. I think in terms of all the platforms, I think Facebook is okay, YouTube is a bit better. The best platform out there right now is Livestream Vimeo. They use minimal compression across the platform. Yeah, we found with Zoom, especially with the organ, certain stops, certain areas, you could do whatever you want with Zoom and it still comes out poorly. And the only way we got around it is we feed Zoom either what we're streaming out to Facebook and YouTube. It's a little bit cleaner. Right. Yeah, I was gonna say, we were hybrid, but when we weren't hybrid, we had the organist playing live and we actually found it worked pretty well for us. We have a decent set of microphones and sound system in the church to pick up on it. But one thing that was interesting is when it went to the recorded, the organist was actually kind of complaining to us that it wasn't sounding as good on Facebook as she was expecting it to. And it actually turned out that I had to ignore Facebook's streaming rules and send it at a higher bit rate than they say, I should send it at and then it worked. But otherwise they were also compressing the hack out of things as people were saying. So it's actually an interesting mix on there to make sure that you're actually putting it out at the right levels as well. So it really comes down to, I think, what equipment you have combined with what settings you've done for whether it's OBS or whatever you're using for that stream. All right, I'm not a sound guy. I'm gonna go ahead and skip past that. And I see we have about 10 minutes left. So I saw two baby pictures I wanted to share. So let me show this. Oh, there we go. All right, caught myself. Okay, so once you've entered and you're watching the live stream, you're able to now pick a seat. So you'll see, I don't know if someone's talking or, you'll see a seating chart. Am I doing everything all right? Okay, let me do that again. I didn't know if somebody was not able to see the screen. So you'll see a seating chart. This is a gift, so it could just come around again. So I'll see the seating chart and when I hover over someone's square, I can see their name. And so this is Beth Canterbury and Cheryl Wells, two friends of mine. So I'm gonna sit with them. And so when I continue to see the live stream and then the three of us are sitting together, you'll see that again. I just hover over that and pick those. So I could pick any of the other rows as well. And then I go in there and you'll see that our microphones are muted to start with. That's something we actually had to learn. And if I take my mic off of mute, the volume of the live stream will automatically go down. So we don't get any of that feedback loop as we talk together. What we actually do find is that there's not a lot of chatting. There's not a lot of talking during the live stream itself. As you can see the woman on the bottom screen, Cheryl. She was actually looking at her TV and she's got her Bible open in her notebook. She doesn't really wanna hear Beth and me talking about whatever, right? So what we do find is that people talk in text-based chat. They'll have a group chat of three or four people either within your row or people in other roads as well. So there's a lot of interaction that happens that way. Just because of time, I'm gonna kind of zoom a little bit ahead but we can come back to this if you'd like. After the service ends, everybody has moved automatically from that auditorium view into what we call the lobby. And so I'll see a bird's eye view of a bunch of tables, right? And actually whoever I was sitting with to begin with, I'll still, now I'll be at a table with them. So if I was in the middle of a conversation with someone and the service came to an end and we got moved to the lobby, I don't have to go find them again. We'll be sitting at a table together. But I can easily see who's at the other tables and I can just move over to another table just kind of like coffee after church. You might be in a two minute conversation or a five minute conversation with someone and then move on and talk with someone else, that kind of thing. So the combination of the bird's eye view plus the screens up here. I did wanna tell you one story about these four people. So one of them is me hand waving there. And then there's these two young women in their 20s. There's Heather and Jill, Jill is in the blue. And there was the first week they had been using the AlterVive. And so I popped in there and asked them what their experience was. And they both said, well, you know, we're introverts. And so we actually don't hang around after church. That whole small talk during coffee is not really something that we enjoy that much. So we usually go out afterwards to get their own coffee and we'll have a real what they call meaningful conversation. And I was a little bit taken aback because I'm like, oh, are we not having a meaningful conversation right now? But actually to them, we were having, we weren't talking about the weather or how was your week? And sort of shallow questions like that. We were actually talking about their experience right here. So they quite enjoyed even though I was a stranger to them meeting together. Then this fourth person, Michelle showed up. Michelle, as you can see, you might be able to see she had a dog in her lap. Okay, Jill said, I mean, Heather said, oh, I love dogs. I love when people bring their dogs on the Zoom calls and things cause it's the only thing that gets me through the week. And then Jill said, oh, I have my dog right here. Now these two are friends. They don't live together. Heather didn't know that Jill had a dog. And so all of a sudden now the three of them are like talking about dogs. I have a dog too. And I pointed my camera at my dog having a great conversation about dogs and, you know, isn't it wonderful? And then whatever else is going on in their lives. The thing I talked to Michelle later and she had been going to that church for 20 years. And she said, I have seen those two girls. She called them girls. I've seen those two girls for years, you know, for three, four or five years. But I've, the only relationship I have with them is I make eye contact and I wave and I smile and I say, good morning. And that's it for five years. That was their entire relationship. But because they were in this type of environment now they're bringing what's in their home with them whatever is behind them or whatever noises are happening or somebody's walking by that kind of thing. So, you know, maybe someone's wearing a baseball cap of a team that doesn't make sense for where you live. Right. And so it just starts a conversation, that kind of thing. And so there are things that we don't bring to church our dogs or maybe our baseball hat or whatever or our books that are behind us that actually now come in here. And so this was an intergenerational relationship that got begun here. So as someone who works at AlterLive and saw that happening, it's quite meaningful to me. Some of the tables are marked off. You can mark them off for prayer. So you'll see it comes around again. There's a welcome table, a meet the pastor table, a prayer table, a next steps table, volunteer opportunities table, things like that. Or just unlabeled, just go and meet with a friend. But a lot of churches, they find time either before or after the service. Sometimes they have a parallel, they'll put the live stream on Facebook and then set up AlterLive as kind of a prayer chapel. So during the service if people wanted prayer, they can come there. Or another day during the week, like a Tuesday night prayer session or something like that. So you click join on the table and this is me and my son. My son lives in Maine. He used to go to church with me down here. So we actually visited one of the churches that's using AlterLive. And then we had found time to pray together. So the reason I picked these is that, those are the things that the churches that we have talked to that they really value. I will say that we put a tremendous amount of work into the live stream and sitting in rows together and the live stream. And that gets used, but it doesn't get used as much as we thought. And some people kind of like, it's a little weird. Looking at other people and not talking to them while watching the live stream, but the lobby and the opportunity for prayer is what people have said has really made a big difference for them. And of course, being able to, being very welcoming to people who are coming in. So I hope that the folks at Elim Church were welcoming to you, Bob. I have heard some stories from that church of there was actually one just last week, someone from Brazil who tuned in. He was, he's planning on moving there for PhD studies in September. So he was just checking it out if that was a church he'd like to go to. And he actually sat down in a row during the service with one of the pastors actually, and is planning on probably going to that church. Well, I'm going back on Sunday. Are you going back? Yeah, because it's the first virtual that they've had in a year or something like that. So what I was watching Sunday was, just to, I'll call it a Zoom session to kind of connotate, there was nobody in church. We saw nobody, no views of the church itself. We saw the minister in a room kind of preaching, but I'm hoping now that there are people in the church. As I said, it's a 1400 seat auditorium. And so hopefully they'll have at least a few people there. And that part of what we see will be the minister, the pastor actually preaching from inside the church. Yes, yes. Well, that'd be great. And if that's happening, if that happens, then I'm going to log in this time. You'll log in this time. May change my name, right? Yeah, yeah. The blue bunny, something like that. I see in the chat that it might take a lot of moderation. So we actually have had a lot of requests for moderation, especially if like, there's been a little bit of, especially when people talk about youth group, using it for youth group, is there a way for there to be some moderation? One thing that we're looking at is the ability for, let's say there's three or four in a row and the live stream is playing for any person in the row to be able to mute everybody. That's like, please let's save the chatter for later. That kind of thing. And then in the text-based chat, as I think I mentioned earlier, the ability for the greeters or someone on staff to moderate the chat, either deleting comments or slowing down or blocking someone from making comments. Jane asked a question about, or maybe was responding to a question about breakout rooms. So yeah, this is a little bit inspired by breakout rooms. So you could think of the tables in the lobby as a breakout room. And what I really like about it is the birds I view. So not that I would get tired of talking with the three or four people I'm with, but if I see someone that I've been wanting to meet or talk to, I can easily just, you know, you just go like this, you do it on Zoom all the time, like, all right, bye, right? And you don't even have to say bye, you do this and everyone knows you're leaving. And then I can just hop over to another table. So it's very fluid. And so if the personal dynamics, the interpersonal dynamics in the tables is just much more natural than it is in the rows during the live stream. I believe Deb Trimble has her hand raised. I do. So do you need to watch this on a computer monitor screen or has it also been optimized for tablet view or cell phone? That's a great question, Deb. I am a boomer. I don't know how people use their phones and get anything done. Me either, but. And I will just say in much of the software world, it's really mobile first. Design for mobile first. And then we did not do that. We designed for laptop first. And part of that was about, you know, usually you have much better bandwidth. The big screen really helps. So we have launched a mobile app, so for, and it's a native app, right? So what happens now is if you get the link and you're on your phone, you click, it will open up your mobile browser and you will be able to watch the live stream and you'll be able to see who else is there. Even if you're logged in. No, I'm sorry, let me take that back. You can't log in on the mobile browser, right? You can see the live stream and you can see who else is there. But if you wanted to interact with anyone, if you wanted to take a seat, it will, you'll get a popup that will say to download the app and then you would download the app. There's a lot going on, as you can imagine. There's a stream for the live stream. There's a three or four way video conference that's going on. There's chat that's going on. So there's a lot that can go wrong. So by having an app that we built ourselves, we have a lot more control over it. So if you're going to use the advanced features, it does. I have another question too. So this, I just want to make sure I understood this because I kind of missed part of the earlier conversation. This basically will wrap around whatever you're doing to stream. So if you're using OBS or Vimeo or any of those other applications, this wraps around that piece. So you're still using the application to do streaming. Yeah, so it's really both ways. Wherever you're, oh, I'm getting a note that my connection is unstable. I promised you I'd get that. However you're streaming now, let's presume you're streaming to YouTube and or Facebook. You could just have that wrap around, as you mentioned it, kind of like ricochet into Alter Live. There are also some ways, depending on which streaming service that you use, that you could go directly into Alter Live. So if you use Resi or Restream, I haven't heard anyone mention those. They're typically for larger churches. Even if you use Zoom, although you get a big lag time if it's on Zoom, it's probably more than a minute. So the people watching online are going to be about a minute behind, which is okay because there's really no interaction between the people live and the people watching online. But you could, under certain circumstances, stream directly into Alter Live. And within the month, we're releasing something so that it'll be much, much easier to do that. So you could go directly from your VMIX or OBS or something like that. Okay, I have one more question. Is there any way you can show us a little bit about how you set this up for the first time? I can. We're right at 802, so I'm happy to do that. Let me see if I can knock off some quick questions if you don't mind hanging around. So let me see. Yes, Samuel, I do think it's good for prayer, so I'm gonna leave your comment alone on that. For small, everyone that we talk to wants to use it for small groups, but their groups are not as small as four people. And it's hard, unless you split your small group in half or in thirds across several tables, it's not really great for that right now. We are moving to expand the tables, the size of the tables. Initially, that would be tables of eight, moving up to 12, and then classroom style for like 25 or 50 people. And that is not within the next 30 days. That's in the 90 days after that. Eric, yeah, thank you. So we take the stream URL or the stream key from wherever else you're broadcasting to and we use that. And I graduated from Georgetown University. I don't want to say what year, but it was 1985. So unless your son is my age. And I never went up to, there was a very, he went to American. Yeah, there's a really great pizza place up near American University, but I didn't know any students up there. We are at the top of the hour and I wanna be mindful of folks time, especially since it is an evening session. Also, it's nice outside, but also we're given and offered freely by, Andy, a plethora of information and I don't wanna stop that either. So if everyone wants to continue on, you're more than welcome to stay. If you're running on a tight schedule, leave as your time permits. So Phil asked a great question and I don't wanna answer, but some people have left, they have used Dr. Live and then did not continue with it. So what were some of the reasons? So we actually always do an exit survey, not everyone responds. I can tell you that in the early days, so December and January and even into February, the platform was not that stable, right? It was quite, if you used it, if anyone used it back then, you would have said there were some glitches. All of a sudden you would disappear or someone else would disappear or they'd freeze. So that was problematic. A lot of churches wanted to keep on going through that, but for some they're like, we'll come back later when it's more stable. That was one thing, that was an early going. We thought we might have a mobile app by January 1st. Forget the date, but it was something like April 1st, only four months late. So a lot of churches were waiting, they're like, we gotta have a mobile app. If we don't have the mobile app, then half of our church is on the mobile. It's just not a solution. So they were waiting for the mobile app and that wait was too long for them. When we had the mobile app, there were some issues around logging in that people sometimes got caught in a bit of a loop, particularly for on iPhone. I don't know why. So for whatever reason, Android is a lot easier to develop for. But at any rate, those bugs are all behind us. So we do reach back out to those churches. Some of them have said that there were some who said the cost. So the cost is $69 a month. So for some church budgets, especially if you're around 50 people, that can be a decent dent in the budget. We're moving to where we think you could use it as a replacement for Zoom, for meetings, for staff meetings like that. And so that could help recover some of your Zoom costs. That's about $15 a month for Zoom. So it takes some of that out of there. So that was an issue, particularly for smaller churches. And some churches, because they're moving back in, they're just not, they're not putting, they're not considering digital to be a long-term thing for them. So they've moved away. I just have a kind of like a comment and question. For us, like a big draw to Zoom was the fact that a lot of people were already trained on it because they were teachers or other things. And on top of that, there was already a lot of material online to coach people on how to use Zoom. So my question is, does Alter Live have materials for being able to train or just like kind of tutorial type stuff for the members to be able to get accustomed to things? Because of course, I had to take on a lot of those responsibilities. And I'm sure that we've all been helping each other out. But does Alter Live have those kinds of tutorials and materials? Yes, yes. So there's a tutorial, but also we found some of the things that lots of people ran into. So I'll just tell you a nice easy one, is if when you pick a seat, the presumption is when you're taking a seat that you're going to be in a video conference session with at least one other person, right? So your camera needs to work and your microphone needs to work. And our presumption also is that you would start with your camera enabled. You wouldn't enable it later and your microphone enabled. And if you didn't have it enabled, that was not good. So you know how, whatever app you're using, if it's the first time and it wants to use the camera, you'll get a pop-up that says, oh, this app wants to use your camera. Do you give it permission, right? And many, many people, they're reflex to any question that is asked of them by a pop-up, the answer is no. So I get a lot of pop-ups that say, is it okay to know your location? And like this app doesn't need to know my location, no, right? Is it okay if this app, you know, asks for a cookie or sends you emails like, no, no. And so a lot of people using Altered Live, no, they would hit no to the camera request. And that left them dead in the water. And there's a way to recover from that, but if you're not facile with the innards of the fifth layer down in your Chrome settings, it's very discouraging. So we actually had a tutorial on like, here you need to make sure that you say yes to that. However, now we've just built it into the product that you almost can't get it wrong. Like basically when you click on a seat, you get a pop, now you get a pop-up that doesn't say, do you give permission? You get a pre-pop-up that says, hey, you're gonna take a seat and you need to tell the browser to give permission to your camera. And here's what it's gonna look like when it asks that question, right? And so when you see that, say yes or allow, right? And then you close our pop-up and then the browser pop-up comes up and now we never have that problem again. So a lot of the things that were in the tutorials about training people and in the early days of the pandemic and people using Zoom, like it took many people months to figure out how to use that mute button. And some maybe still have still not, but there were just like some basic use, basic human error, you don't have to be a genius to use it. There's things that we need to learn what people were bumping into and so a lot of those things. But yeah, of course, we have some video tutorials for the, on the administrator side, we have a lot of tech guides and things like that. Yeah, thank you. Andy, I believe we have a question from Jim who had his hand raised for a while. Hi, thanks. And then the same. Guys, I apologize, I got here late, but is there a period, does it take a period to make decisions and implement things before you start using it or is it fairly plug and play? Oh boy, that's awesome. Sam, is it Sam? That's a great question. Oh, Jim, I'm sorry. Well, it is plug and play, but most churches, there'll be one or two people who play with it for a couple of days, right? They'll run two fake services and try it out. And then there's one, usually they do one or two Sundays and they just kind of small invited group. And if it goes well, then they start expanding the group. And I would tell you the reason is Sunday, I mean, that's the main show, right? So let's not like, we don't wanna mess with the main show and we don't wanna introduce this to our whole congregation and if it's really gonna work or they're gonna be little problems or they're gonna be technical glitches, like whatever it is. And you don't wanna mess with Sunday, right? So churches are usually pretty careful about how they roll that out. What we typically recommend, although it's not required, is to try starting with something that's not Sunday. So start with a prayer group or start with a Bible study or maybe just use the lobby so that after church is over. So we see this all the time on Facebook, like when the service, when you're done watching on Facebook, come over to Zoom and we're all gonna gather in Zoom, right? So this would be come over and gather in Alter Live. We're gonna try that for a while and see what that's like with the tables as kind of organic breakout rooms, that kind of thing. So that usually goes a little bit faster but each church is different, it really depends on, it's actually the person like you, Jim, who is usually the one who decides are you gonna go left, you're gonna go right, like are you gonna slow, gonna go fast? I reckon, we do find that we have had no churches who out of the box got a lot of adoption. It usually takes four weeks before that you can take the training meals off. Not because of the technology, it's because of the, it just could change, introducing change. And what we have found is that people, like maybe people never used Facebook or they used Facebook but now they use it for church or whatever and they have grown used to it. And for better or worse, that's where they are. I will just tell you, my church, so my church does not use Alter Live. My church is about 800 people and for years we used YouTube as a sermon library and when COVID hit, we just flipped, we used it and did a live stream, one service 10 o'clock on Sunday, everybody watched it. In August, they got really excited about Facebook and we're gonna have a digital campus and at Facebook, every communication that goes out, every single email, all the announcements before church, everything always mentioned and find us on Facebook, go over to Facebook, Facebook, Facebook. Just this past Sunday, I went to church online at my church. On Facebook, there were 85 people and on YouTube, there were 450 people. So a year, a year of telling everyone, go over to Facebook and they still don't go. So it's not the technology, it's the people at that point. So that change management needs to be planned for and expectations set and kind of milestones put in there. So thank you, Jim, for asking that question. Samuel, did you have a question? Yeah, I mean, it's kind of just like a small technical question but how often does the application push updates? One of the issues that I had with Zoom was often people not being on the same update and that causing a lot of issues. So does, you know, how often does, does often I push out updates? Okay, great. Does it make it fairly easy to update? Yeah, and before I answer it, I just want to point out that, yeah, Randall, that very point about switching platforms is a real issue. Well, it's browser-based. So if you're on a desktop, there's nothing to push, right? You're always getting access to the latest. On the mobile, right now we push out updates every week because there's always, either it's because of bug fixes or every week we had issues with the sign-up process. So for four or five weeks, it was the new one, sometimes more than one a week. And there are lots more features that every church asks for. And we try to make the mobile experience equivalent to the desktop experience. So for us, I would say on the desktop, I would expect weekly updates, yeah. Usually on the phone, those happen automatically. I mean, you can, if you have your settings for update automatically. Is that the issue? Was that about mobile updates that you were thinking of? Well, no, just in general. I mean, I just wanted to know if there were, like, if you have like stable builds and like... Yeah, well, with Zoom on my desktop, this is actually a native app. It's not using a browser. There is a browser option, I think, in Zoom, I don't know if I've ever used it. But Alter is all browser-based. Okay, okay. Anybody else have a question? And I have not forgotten Deb's request about showing how to set it up. Okay. Do we wanna switch gears and show a sample setup? Yeah, I'll do that. This is probably a good transition point for those who don't have a question or don't care to see it set up that you can quietly or audibly disappear. And I'll... Thank you all for coming. I'll wait a second. Thank you so much, Andy. I do have one more question besides the demo. We have a lot of people who watch worship after the live stream. Is this only available during the live stream period or can they go in and watch afterwards? Obviously they're not necessarily gonna be able to partake with the meeting rooms, but... Deb, you're making me smile. All right, so after talking with... So I have no ideas of my own. I steal all of my ideas from pastors or the tech leaders. And back a couple of months ago, I talked to one pastor who was like, you know, here's what we're gonna do. We have certain people who just don't show up on Sunday, either because they work on Sunday or for health reasons or... And actually during this... Well, I know at my church, it's that soccer and baseball, Lidley beats church on Sundays for several months. This guy, he was a pastor and it's in New Jersey, kind of close to the shore. So during the summer, people, they go to the shore, but it's far away from church. So they don't go to church in the morning and the shoreline after. They're there the whole weekend. So they lose people during the summer that way. And what he said is, you know, we have a lot, all those people, we don't know who they are necessarily, but we get a lot of on-demand views, right? After the church service is over. So after 10 o'clock, after 12 o'clock, they watch it on Sunday night, they'll watch it during the week. He said, what we're gonna do, we're not gonna make it, we're gonna make another, a repeat of the recording of the service available on, and he picked Monday, on Monday night at 7 p.m. It's only available in altar. So it's sort of, you know, appointment, it's still appointment watching, right? It's not purely on-demand. But everyone who missed church will be there. And you automatically all have one thing in common, which is that you were doing something else on Sunday morning. And the pastor goes to that church service too and sits in the rows and's like, oh, you're gonna like this part that's coming up next. You know, and then maybe hangs out at the tables afterwards. So there's a little bit of a bonus to going on Monday because you get to talk with the pastor in a little more intimate setting. So a number of churches have done that. I call it Sunday on Monday. So the answer is definitely you can do that. You do have to set up a time, right? It's not gonna be on-demand, right? And you'll see when I set it up what that would look like. All right, well- I'm presuming the stream would still be sitting out on Facebook too, so they can always just watch it the way they usually do. Yes, but in this case, I will unabashedly say, it's way better. Yeah. We have people who follow us from Hawaii and they're in a different time zone. So they're generally watching church that was at 10 at maybe 11 or 12. So anyway. Well, you could do it in an ultra light. The thing is it would have to be appointment TV. Right, got it. It is another scheduled event for those who couldn't make it at the other time. And I think when in the hybrid case, I'm gonna just say there's this one possibility. I'm not gonna necessarily advocate for it. That maybe there is a one group that goes into the building and then at a separate time, there's a group that watches it online. And that way there's something that you can do that's just for the online people that they wouldn't be able to get if it was combined with the in-person. That comes with issues because then it gets to that like we have two different communities. So like I said, I don't advocate for it. There are some advantages I think, but in the longterm, I don't know if that's necessarily the healthiest thing for a church. So I don't want the tech to drive the lifestyle of the church. And Jim, did I see you raise your hand one more time? Or all right, so Deb, I'm gonna go ahead and share my screen and everybody follow along. I can't, when I share my screen, I can't see the way I do it. I can't see you. So feel free to shout out if I need to slow down and repeat something. Bear with me, I got too many windows open. No, not that one. Oh, here we go. All right, this is a fake church that I have set up called Faith Community. So that's a generic name as you can get. So, but when you sign up, you just come in and it says, create a community, you give it a name. You say who's the administrator for it. And then the next thing you do is you add an event. So I'm gonna go up here into the right-hand corner and add a new event. So the first thing is I'll give it a name, right? So I'm gonna call this Southern New England, you see, I can give it an image if I want, just pick something from, that's a gift, forget it. I didn't think I was gonna do this. So I didn't have one at the handy. But I'm gonna say what date and time it begins. The key thing here is whatever you set this for, that the time is whenever you want the live stream to begin, not when you want people to start showing up. So if you're having people show up at 10 o'clock, you might not want the live stream to begin till 10.05 so that late-comers will see it. Or you have people arrive five minutes early and you start the live stream directly at your time, but you just pick a time that you want it to begin. You can say whether this is gonna be, like if this is a Tuesday night Bible study, I want this to happen every Tuesday and then I don't have to recreate it every single week. I go on to my next step, which is to find the team of greeters. So I'm gonna add people. So this is myself. These are a lot of people who have joined this community. So anyone in this community I can pick. So this is my, there's my boss right here, Stephanie Leeds. She's the CEO. So I'm gonna select them. I can say whether you're a host and or a greeter, there's a slight difference in the capabilities there. I'll go into it in a second if you want. You can say what's the standard greeting. We're glad that you're here. Please pick a seat or something like that. It might, if it's Easter, it's a happy Easter everyone. You can change it every single week. The next step is I view at the permissions. Is this for anyone? Just like your church now, the door is open to anybody. Or is it an event that just for people already belong to this community? For churches that have like a church conference or a retreat, oftentimes it's only open to members and not people from the outside as defined. And then selected members would be like, if I'm having a meeting, I don't want these five people. So I'll pick those members, right? So I'll go and I'll just pick one, two or three. If I pick, these are real people. If I pick them, they'll get an email that says they're invited to one. So I won't pick them right now. But I usually keep it open to anyone. And then here is the nice, this is the most interesting part actually, which is where's the stream gonna come from? So I can come from Facebook or YouTube or Vimeo. And then these five down here, these are streaming services. You also can actually do Zoom. We don't have Zoom listed here. There's some custom embedding that you can do. I always pick a Vimeo and then I have a cheat here, which is, oops, I don't wanna use this. So I've got some videos here. So I'll just take, I'll take this, this is an Alter Live one. So I'm gonna copy the link and I just go back here and I paste in the link. All right, I'll get a little preview here. And then last is I'm gonna say, are there any slides that I want for everyone to see beforehand, right? So I might just pick something like that. I can have multiple. So these can be your announcements or pictures from the youth retreat that just happened or the mission trip or something like that. And they're just eye candy. They'll roll back for five seconds or 10 seconds. You can pick how long you would like them to roll. And then they will present on the screen until the time that you selected for the live stream and then the live stream will begin. And then I just publish that. And here we are. So from here, I can just click right in here. I can copy the URL and now I can put that in my newsletter and the email or put it on the website and then anyone who clicks there, they'll come directly in. When I click here, I see all these tiles are all the events that are for this faith community. So for your church, you might have all the tiles for all of the upcoming events as well. And I'll click on that. And you see, there's my slide ahead of time. I had this to start at 9.30 or something like that, which is in 54 minutes. But I can go live right now. So I'm gonna click this go live button. And now the video is gonna begin. So everybody who's present in the event, I'm gonna go ahead and pick a seat. And now I'm in there. And then there is, I'm the host of this. And so one of the options I have as the host is to move everyone to the lobby, right? So that's gonna give me a 10 second warning. And you see here, I'm in this row right here. When I hover over, you can see my name. And when we move to the lobby, I'm going to be at a table. So you see, I was still talking and uninterrupted. If there was anyone here with me, they would be able to continue hearing me in a stream. And now I'm just at a table. And of course, I can jump from one table to the next. I'm the only one here. So it's not as exciting as if you were all here with me, but that's how quick it is to set up. I think I saw you smile, Deb. I came back and you were smiling. So that must have gone well. I think you are on mute. I think you're muted. So one of the things early on actually was every time you had an event, you had to create it, you had to set it up again and it had another, a new URL, which was a pain in the neck for the administrator. Cause that meant, oh man, now I gotta update it everywhere I've posted it. And any, if someone reads last week's email and just says, oh, there's the link. I'll click on that. They're gonna go to a dead event. So now we have it so that it's the same URL for any event that's recurring at the same time on the same day of the week. So a little bit of clarification, Andy. So you, in your example, you picked a video that was already, it could have been a cashed or a prerecorded worship service, but you brought that in from Vimeo. That's right. But you could have, which is a good way of doing that, Sunday on Monday example. Usually though, that would not be a video. You would be, you have the option in your list there if I'm following correctly, where you could input the stream URL and stream key. That's right. Thank you, Eric. Yeah. And it's particularly easy if you're using YouTube because YouTube will give you a premier link. So the video of course won't start on YouTube until whatever the time is, whatever, whenever that time is, is when it will start on Alter Live as well. Facebook also does premieres, but they don't publish the URL until the event goes live. And all of our, we have a small handful of churches who do that and the admin makes a mad dash when Facebook starts and they copy it and paste it into Alter Live. I'm sure there's some swearing that goes on during that. And Vimeo also, can you do a premiere on Vimeo? It doesn't work as well when it's a premiere on Vimeo. The reason is with YouTube, when I'm watching, if I, let's say I show, you're all there and I show up late and I come into the live stream, I'll pick it up wherever YouTube is at that time. And if I pause and then unpause, pause for a minute and then I hit play again, it will bring me to where YouTube is right now. Vimeo does not do that. It doesn't have the syncing. So that's something we're seeing if we can, there's no API for it. At least if there is, we don't know it. So it doesn't work as well with Vimeo. So each of the platforms has their idiosyncrasies. Any questions? Perhaps, Andy, if you could put your contact information in the chat if somebody wants to reach out. Any other questions, folks, comments? I should mention one thing. I do have a marketing bone in my body. To use the interactive services, you do need to have a paid subscription. And it is $69 a month. For the first month, it's $29. That covers our costs and it makes it less prohibitive to just get started. If you wanna just play with it, $29 is a little less painful than $69. To do that, you can always contact me or go to our website, it's on our website, but just use the word community, all capital letters, and that'll get you a discount code. So if you wanted to play with it, you can get started for $29. Hi, can you hear me again? Yes. Yay, I'm back. There you go. We're back. I lost everything for a minute, everything froze. With regard to billing. So probably like many churches, we don't use a credit card to pay bills. Our treasurer pays things. Is there that option for billing? Well, I know there is not. It is credit card right now, which is just for simplicity sake, but I can see that that's not gonna be simple for you. It's not to say that we can't figure it out. It's only credit card then, so there's no bank. That's right. Anything, okay. That's something we have to work out at our church for other things too. So, okay, thank you. Mike Higgins on the bottom row, I know that you don't have video on. I just wanna make sure that you had a chance to ask a question, same with Jim. I know Jim, you asked once or maybe twice, but I just wanna make sure Mike has a chance. I'm good, Eric, thank you. Okay. Anybody else have a question or comment? Andy, thank you so much. It was a pleasure. Likewise, and Bob, I'm looking for you on Sunday. There you go. I don't want you to be chartreuse alligator. I want you to be Bob Yeats. Looking, are you gonna be there? It is Memorial Day weekend. You could be doing something else. It's nine o'clock in the morning, so before you get started. So, Bob, just ask you, Andy, if you were gonna be there. Oh, I, that's a little bit late. It's not nine o'clock in the morning. It's 10 o'clock their time. It's 12 o'clock my time. Well, they have more than one service, and the one I was on started at 9.15 our time. I mean, they used to have two, they used to do two services in older life. Now they just do one. So the last time you were there was, so they switched it to just the later service. I was there Sunday and looked on the 9.15. I'm gonna have to check that out. All right, but I might be there. I might be there. I log in and I make my name, Andy, Alter Live Andy, because I'm there for troubleshooting in case somebody asks questions. Every gathering has subplot. Yeah, I go to 50 or 60 church services on Sunday. Wow. Over church. Thank you everybody. Thank you for joining us. I'm over church, yes. Eric, one question. Where's the recording of this gonna be posted? It will be posted on the S&E UCC way, and I will work on it first thing tomorrow morning, since I have some available time. Yay, thank you. How'd it happen? No problem. Appreciate it. Well, thank you everyone. I really enjoyed it and some great questions and observations, so I appreciate it. Thank you very much, Andy. Take care, Andy. Thank you so much. All right, thank you. Thank you, thank you. Have a good night, y'all.