Uploading files, managing images, videos and audio clips and making sure every visitor to the church website can easily watch or listen online is a daunting task for most churches. So when I first demoed SermonMediaPortal.com, I was very impressed.
Here’s a tool that seemingly does it all: media management, file uploading and even a slick and browser-friendly interface for church website visitors. No more hassles for trying to make your media look good on a PC and a Mac - regardless of which browser is used.
The Sermon Media Portal interface
The interface (seen above) is intuitive and simple, two features I like when it comes to removing barriers for people checking out audio, video or pictures on your church website.
But perhaps best of all is the flat fee of only $149 a month for 5 Gigabytes of online storage and 10 Gigabytes of bandwidth (file playback) that makes it affordable for nearly every size of church. Plus, you can upgrade or downgrade your account through your portal interface when your needs change.
You don’t have to install anything on your church website, nor do you even have to know a thing about web coding. The Sermon Media Portal is a stand-alone web application that resides on their computer servers. This means your church can choose to either link to your Sermon Media Portal page or have your webmaster include the page within your existing church website.
I was pleased to find that the Sermon Media Portal interface looked good in every browser I tried on both my Mac and Windows computers. The interface is so straightforward and simple to use, your church website visitors will quickly and easily be able to click on the large buttons to get the exact media they’re looking for.
Four big, easy buttons give instant access to site visitors
Visitors to your website will be able to watch videos, listen to audio and browse image galleries from the Sermon Media Portal interface with the ubiquitous Flash® plug in that is on over 95% of internet browsers. That means no special software is required for them to download from your media portal for their experience to be quick and easy.
Videos, image galleries and audio each include a section for you to type in notes or comments
The only real effort on the part of the church will be in converting videos into Flash video files before uploading. Since there are many programs, including several free programs such as DVDVideoSoft’s "Video to Flash Converter", that make quick work of this conversion process, it seems that this step will not be a painful one for even non-techies to do for their media portal.
Customizing the Sermon Media Portal to have the brand and identity of the church is also a simple process, handled neatly by the options interface on the portal.
Add logos, your website link, contact information and a welcome message
Customize the button colors quickly and easily
I’ve been in the position of managing online media content for my church before. It wasn’t easy, I was the only one who could do it and keeping track of the media used to be a hassle. With Sermon Media Portal, you can allow each ministry to upload their own media, ensuring quick delivery of time-sensitive content. And with the online visual tools to track usage and storage space, managing the media is finally an easy task.
The Sermon Media Portal dashboard makes adding media, managing your account and getting tech support a snap
As you can tell, I’m a big fan of this solution for churches. There are other companies and services that offer online media hosting, but to date I’ve not seen a better value for the quality, easy of use and cost than SermonMediaPortal.com.
With anything I recommend, I encourage your church to go and sign up for a demo to see for yourself if this solution is the right one for you. Bottom line for me is that I think this is currently one of the best options on the market for churches.
- Anthony D. Coppedge
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