Engaging the Audience

Courtesy of Audience Matters, Inc.

We recently added overlays to our live stream service to help engage the audience and it seems to be going great. We have received positive comments on it from our online and live attenders so far and the process has been easy. To give a bit of a background as to what we're doing at HCC, we have been running a live internet service for about three years now and we have tried just about everything within our budget to build and engage our audience. We're using a simple setup of about three cameras, a video switcher, streaming software, and presentation software to pull our live streaming service off three times a week. About three weeks ago we added the presentation software, ProPresenter, to help with the overlays and that has helped us tremendously with engaging both our online audience and our live church attenders. 

By adding the overlays we are eliminating the constant switching from the main screen with the lyrics or PowerPoint presentation to the different camera angles, which was way too much movement for a production. By adding lower thirds to the screen we can have the words and the live cameras on the same screen and we can concentrate on switching our camera angles when needed. Switching to too many different elements, we found, was losing our audience whether than engaging them. Adding the lower thirds to the live video not only engages the audience but gives them the sense that they are a part of the service instead of being spectators. 

When considering setting up an live stream or adding new creative elements to your services the first question you should always ask is how can we engage our audience when doing this or how will this engage our audience if we add this element? Answering this question will help save a lot of headaches and money down the road.