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Chip: Hi, my name is Chip Dizard and I am very blessed to be here with Andy
Ivankovich. I think I pronounced your last name correct, did I?
Andy: You did.
Chip: Okay. He is the founder of UpperRoom Tech, a San Antonio
company, and I just want to talk to him today a little bit about the
background of the company, about UpperRoom Tech, and then about the
exciting launch of Media Fusion. Welcome, Andy.
Andy: Thank you, glad to be here.
Chip: So I want to talk to you a little bit about just Media Fusion, and
before we get into Media Fusion I want to talk to you about just UpperRoom
Tech. Tell me how long you've been in business and give me a brief
background about the company.
Andy: Yeah. We started in 2006 and actually I was in the corporate world
working for a big company named USAA and I was attending church at Oak
Hills Church here in San Antonio where Max Lucado preaches. And being a big
church, we just got involved in a lot of things and we found ourselves with
a group of friends of mine developing software on the side that the church
could use, and small groups.
One thing led to another, with Max traveling and other folks getting
out and around, he would talk about us and next thing we know there's a lot
of churches asking and then our world is small, right? And next thing you
know, we're going around the world and taking phone calls and it got too
busy and so we decided to start a company, UpperRoom Technologies, that my
wife actually runs as the CEO and I'm still heavily involved but she's got
the discipline, she's got the approach for operations in supporting
churches. So, that's our company in a nutshell, if you will.
Chip: Wow, so it was born out of a church. And for the people that are
listening or watching this and there's a lot of entrepreneurs and people in
churches and I got my start in church as well, as even in the business and
the blogging and things, so I totally, totally understand that. And on your
blog it talks about in 2006 the birth of your company and I see some of the
awesome things that you've been doing here and as USAA and then working
with Tata Consulting and for Andy and things like that. So, that's a great,
great thing. So, I just also wanted to talk to you really about this
exciting platform for churches. Tell me just a genesis behind Media Fusion.
Can you hear me, Andy?
Andy: There you go now.
Chip: Okay, I just wanted to make sure. Tell me the genesis, the background
behind Media Fusion and how it came about.
Andy: Yeah, Media Fusion, if you look at what most churches are dealing
with, right? They generate content every weekend but traditionally they
were starting off with podcasts and then video moved into the realm. What
we were aiming to try to do for churches back in 2010 was just to get them
off of trying to do archive media and having to spend a lot of money with
bandwidth charges. And if you remember, about '09 I think it was, Vimeo
came on the world platform there, really user-friendly, full HD, able to
cut and paste things inside of folks' websites. So we really began to
attack that to say, "Look, if you paid, "I think at the time it was $60 for
a Vimeo Plus account, a church could upload and handle all their video
without paying the $2 or $3 per gigabyte just to watch an archived video.
But what we found was is that most churches were still struggling
with trying to have one place upload it. We're unique, we're a niche
market, right? And churches have technology needs and so we developed this
interface that allowed somebody, an administrator or a techie, to just
upload their videos and organize it based on sermon series. And so, that
would allow them to immediately embed that into their existing websites. So
it was a little widget and it took, there were a lot of things that were
out there at the time which is embed codes, and it worked well.
So that was the start and we set that up out to really be a low price
offering for churches, so I think when we first launched it it was $10 a
month is what churches were paying for. So, what they would normally cost
to pay for a designer or even do podcasting, for a fraction of that they
could get their church up and running and online.
Chip: Wow. So I see that on your site, so basically churches can sign up
now for this. This is actually live and it's ready to go.
Andy: Yeah, yeah.
Chip: Okay.
Andy: And what we just did too was release a new version. About 12 months
ago we really looked at Media Fusion, we never really did a whole lot with
it ever since that first installation in 2010 but we had a lot of churches
that were coming on. We would have churches signing up like every other
day. Then we started getting a lot of requests, and about last year we
decided to re-look at it. Well the biggest things that folks were wanting
to do was, A, they wanted it to be more, you were hear things about, "Hey,
can we build this into our mobile site?," can we develop an iPhone app, can
we develop a Droid app.
We started looking at this and saying, "Well gosh, HTML 5 came out
with responsive design. Wouldn't it be great if we rebuilt the entire
application with responsive design? That way churches didn't have to build
a separate app." Then the other thing that really was coming up was live
streaming and simulated live streaming. So live streaming obviously is
pretty basic but huge infrastructure, but there are a lot of churches that
wanted all their media together. So we started looking at that, started
finding out more about simulated live, and I'll talk about that in a bit,
and then the design, trying to figure out how to get a better design out
there for users.
Chip: Okay. And these days, I deal with a lot of churches often, and I
don't know one church maybe ten years ago, let's say even seven years ago
when I got into even the streaming business, I don't know one church that I
go to that says they don't want their stuff live. Everybody, it's almost
like having, maybe 15 years you went to church, Andy, and you didn't see
people with wireless connections at church. But now almost any church
across the country you walk into has a WiFi connection.
Andy: Yeah. And this is a unique thing, we always talk about that churches
are creating content every weekend already so they have a process set up
for that and we saw the evolution, right? That pre-2010 everybody was able
to do podcasting. It's the easiest thing, they produce a program. All they
do is somebody is recording the sermon and a church administrator or
secretary could upload that to iTunes, and we saw that happening.
But when you take the experience, and you've got a lot of volunteers
that probably know how to operate a camera, and then it just has evolved
with Apple products, for instance, on editing software. Really easy to
begin doing some short edits and clean edits and then next thing you know
we have people producing video.
Well, the next step is if you're doing all that, all you have to do
now is go a little bit forward and now you can broadcast live. Well, prior
to 2010, in order to broadcast live you were usually going down to the
local TV station, which we still see a lot of churches doing. But Internet
connectivity, everybody with high speed bandwidth at the homes in America,
all the sudden that opened up a whole new realm of possibilities. You have
Netflix that paved the way to devices like Roku and Xbox, that all the
sudden now you can reach the 50-inch flat screen at home very easily but it
was trying out figure out, "Okay, how do you tap in or how does a church
tap into that pipe?"
Chip: Wow. And one of the things that I guess when I read about the company
and about the other things is that you have a really affordable price.
That's one thing you all push, at least from all the information I read.
Talk about just a pricing with streaming in general because a lot people
are confused about that. A lot of churches don't understand what bandwidth
is, they don't understand what gigabytes and all that stuff.
Andy: Yeah, and that was our aim. I'm a guy, we're a very open company but
I like to solve big problems, I don't like to approach things in a, I
guess, what's out there, innovation is what drives me. And I had a couple
of patents from USAA doing some of this online capability but when you're
looking at the church the needs are still the same. If you're a Fortune 100
or you're a small church, you still want to get stuff online because that's
where you want to be.
So when you're talking about the complexity, I don't think that there
is ever a problem with churches in America that, let's say, had more than
1,000 or 2,000 people attending. Could they get on live? Yes. Could they
build infrastructure? Yes. They had the budgets, they had the resource to
be able to do that. But I think there's an estimate Outreach talks about
that there's maybe 1,200 large churches in America, right? Everybody else,
the other 300,000 are average 75, they have a bi-locational pastor, and so
it basically locked them out. But they have content, they have a mission, a
local mission they're trying to reach.
So when I was doing a lot with Oak Hills, because obviously we had
Max Lucado who has 100,000,000 books in print and he's a well-known person,
great speaker, but he's been doing it for 25, 30 years. And so when Oak
Hills, at a 10,000 member church, are attendee church on a weekend to do
live streaming infrastructure, it was a budget item. So, the Oak Hill's
infrastructure had to do one thing first, the ability to encode your video
to H.264. And what we mean by that is that anytime you're connected to the
Internet you take a live video or output from a camera or a switcher, then
you're going to encode that.
Well, you need an encoder. These encoders, though, even today cost
upwards of $25,000, $40,000. So an Oak Hills church with a large budget of
10,000 people, they can afford that. And then the capability of actually
streaming that, now you run into bandwidth and bandwidth simply is the use
of your content going out and allowing anybody to access it. Well, there's
a cost and we usually talk about cost to stream a video is it's based on
gigabyte. It sounds all this strange technology, right? And you're telling
a pastor, "gigabyte."
Well, in most cases doing streaming, especially a small church,
you're going to spend a $1, $1.50 per gigabyte and I think that if you can
estimate a 75-minute sermon on standard definition, not even HD, it's going
to take a $1.50 to $2.00 per time of 75 minutes that somebody connect with
their iPhone. A couple bucks, you times that by 100 or 200 or anybody
coming in and it becomes very expensive.
So, what we started to do at Media Fusion is, at UpperRoom, we pulled
in the guys and there'd been a lot of developers had been with us for many
years and we said, "How do we make this cheaper?" Well, we attacked it in a
couple of ways. When we talk about the capability of bandwidth, folks are
encoding nowadays with software, which is a little bit less expensive which
is a little bit less expensive than the server, but primarily everybody was
still having to encode through servers. There's great companies like
Digital Rapids, for instance, sells a server based unit, $30,000 or
$40,000.
So, still expensive but we started to do some research and we found
these companies, one is called Teradek out of Irvine, California. And as we
were working with them, they have these small, tiny devices called Cubes
and one is called a VidiU. And what they're using them for was when a
broadcast company goes to an NFL stadium, they're able to pass these HD
streams, huge streams, from, say, if you got this little camera that goes
over the top of the stadium, it had their little encoders that wirelessly
transmitted an encoded H.264 all the way back to their truck, which then
they're tapping into some bigger infrastructures to broadcast it on
national TV.
But these little devices were running $700 or $600, they did the
exact same thing that these larger $25,000 and $30,000 servers do. Now that
said, you get a little bit more refinement and, just like with everything,
you can do a little bit more with an expansive box but you've got to have
somebody who understands network IT, you have to have staff people, it's a
complex server. So, when you're talking about these little devices that
Teradek had, we said, "Wow, this kind of opens up a small church to take
right out of . . .," we see all these cameras now that are HD, GoPros are
even HD for $300 and they have an output for HDMI. Well, if you take that
HDMI, you can plug it into these little devices and voila, you can encode.
Now, in order to encode you got to set it up to a network somewhere
that's going to distribute your video across. That's a problem because most
cases there's been tools and techniques that folks have used, there's one
called "Wowza", for instance.
Chip: Yep, Wowza Media Server.
Andy: Yeah, and if you hook it up to an Amazon web service you can create a
distribution capability but it's not a true CDN. What I mean by that is
that it may be okay for a local destination being if I had three or four
people in San Antonio that wanted to connect to my church, you could
probably do it with a Wowza server. You go outside of that, you're going to
run into all kinds of delay. So if someone is coming in from Maine or
Florida, you're going to have more and more problems, so you really have to
connect into these big infrastructures.
And who's out there doing this? Well, you got companies like
Brightcove, you got companies like Limelight, you got companies like Akamai
and you still have to have big bucks to work with these guys. So all them,
to work with them requires you to sign a two-year agreement or one-year
agreement.
Chip: And, just to interrupt you. Just for people that don't know, CDN
stands for content delivery network, just for some people who didn't know
that. And I also want to talk to you because most of the churches I deal
with and who may be listening to this may have never even heard of Akamai,
may not have heard of Wowza, may have not heard of this. All they know, a
lot of churches they know two things, Ustream, Livestream, and has ads and
maybe YouTube, YouTube Streaming. Tell me why churches should kind of shy
away from these or why do you feel churches should shy away from the
UStreams, the YouTubes, and all that other stuff?
Andy: I think when we look at the live streams which are, they do give the
capability for someone to broadcast live. The problem is with the live
streams and the others, as you get into more custom based solutions you're
going to end up paying just as much as you would with the bigger CDN.
They're also built for consumer based products. What I mean by that is that
somebody who wants to film his band, a kid, and they're doing a concert and
they want all their friends to see it on Facebook, they're going to use
Livestream, they're going to use some of these other systems.
But when you're talking about a church that maybe has a national
following or a church that has people that are deployed to Afghanistan and
they're in Army, when you're trying to connect to a Livestream, you're
going to drop a lot. And so we heard a lot of that coming in from some of
the churches we were working with saying that it's there but it's not there
yet. And really when you look at it, you're limited in the offering. So,
and then you've got to set up, you still got to configure all this stuff,
so you still have that volunteer or that techie and how does that help the
bi-locational pastor who's trying to get his sermon done but now he's got
to worry about this?
So, we attack this from a point of view that, okay, we have a couple
of thousand churches using us right now, we started to get some peer groups
together in that segmented, and we started talking about then if we were
able to offer bandwidth charges at an extremely low rate and we made it
easy. And we said easy, "What do you mean?" I said, "Well, maybe two clicks
or three clicks and you're set up." Because when you're using Livestream,
YouTube, or these others, you're doing a lot of movement. And so again,
prior to 2010 you're going all over the place to set up basic stuff. And
can somebody figure it out? Like I said, the larger churches with budgets
who have paid staff can do this all day long but the smaller churches
can't.
Chip: So Andy, and let me interrupt you real quick. So what you're telling
me with Media Fusion, so what I'm used to doing streaming, my church we
have a TriCaster, we go out from the TriCaster, but a lot of churches can't
afford a $20,000 piece of equipment, a $30,000, $40,000 TriCaster, and we
just connect via the TriCaster. So what you have, and then I recommend some
churches to use a Wirecast, okay? I don't know if you've heard of Wirecast.
Andy: Yep.
Chip: I'm a big Wirecast fan. But what you have is an end to end solution
because Teradek is that, it really goes on the camera, that's what you're
saying, so it's an end to end solution. You don't even need a computer,
right?
Andy: Yeah, you don't need a computer, you don't need a server, so we call
it a non-server based encoder. Actually what I think is going to happen is
that Teradek has this market locked up but I think everybody is going to be
rushing into this because there is an ease when all the sudden you have a
standalone tiny device. And you're right, it can hook up to a camera or it
can hook up to a switcher. So if you're doing multi-camera shoots, you can
hook this up so it's versatile.
Chip: Now tell me, because a lot of churches I talk to and who will hear
this, they have a mounted camera already so they don't have one camera,
they have the cameras mounted so Teradek works with that as well, that's
what you're saying?
Andy: Yeah. And what you would do is you would do your live feed out of
your switcher. So if a church has a Panasonic switcher or something to
where they're able to move from camera to camera, you would take that live
output feed and just attach that to the Teradek as if that's where you're
broadcasting to. So the Teradek allows you to, it's got one red button that
you click that says "go live" and it's already configured to talk to Media
Fusion so it's as simple as to click a button and not having to mess around
with servers that may go down.
The second thing that we like about the Teradek, and we've tested
this with a couple of churches, is it's mobile. These things are so small
that if you're going to a baptism and the church wants to feed back an
outside baptistery back into the main church or broadcast it, or a picnic,
it's three inches. And so it allows the capability for them to do a lot
more than, you're not going to lug around a server anywhere.
Chip: Yeah, I was just talking to a gentleman the other day in Washington,
D.C. and he was telling me, "Well, what card should I get? Should I get the
Hauppauge card? Should I get this?" And I'm not a real hardware guy but I
know enough about streaming where we have a computer, you need a certain
type of card to connect to your, and it's just a nightmare for some people,
it's a nightmare.
Andy: And, yeah. So the Teradek is a great option and the quality is equal
to what you see on the bigger servers. The bigger servers though, they do
give you some capability but, gosh, if I'm a church that has shied away
from live streaming, there's not an argument for that anymore, going with a
Teradek device as a solution.
Chip: Okay. So I want to ask you a couple more question because I don't
want to hold you up too long. But I want to know, so with your pricing, you
sell Teradeks with your bundle or do you have to buy that separately? Tell
me how a church could sign up and get that equipment.
Andy: Yeah, let's just talk a second about how we went about our pricing.
So, first off we're about the church and so we are constantly aiming at our
price points and so we've looked at everybody, what they' were providing,
and how much it was. And actually we even scratched our heads a little bit
because of how we were able to buy wholesale bandwidth and asking, "Why do
all these bandwidth providers charge you so much?"
We came at a conclusion that we think that in most cases a market
exists and it can take advantage of the consumer because there's limited
options. So, we negotiated a deal, a very large deal, to where we're buying
hundreds of terabytes through Akamai, that brought our price down for
bandwidth. Then the next step is we had to integrate that into Media Fusion
to get to that "three clicks and you're able to broadcast" point, so we
took many months of working directly with them.
The second thing we did is we did work with Teradek and we got them
to do something really cool with us, is put us up as a certified reseller.
So you can buy that separately. We've talked about rolling it in as a
package but at the low costs we're just saying that we can facilitate that
for you, we can get it the next day, but you don't have to order it from an
expensive online store. So we're able to do that and then we charge $30 a
month for the archive version, which is just getting your videos up with
podcasting, same responsive design.
Then to get into the live streaming capability we had to buy several
licenses for these advanced players and so we charge an additional $30 for
Media Fusion which is a total of $60 to be able to do live streaming. Then
yes, you do have a bandwidth charge but our bandwidth charges start as low
$0.25 per gig, versus a $1.00, $1.50 with others. And it's that heavy
infrastructure of Akamai, which has been around since '99 and they've been
thought as the guys that power one-third of the Internet. We worked out a
deal directly with them to where we're tapping into their network and then
we're able, because we're buying so much terabytes, to lower the cost to
where we're able to get into that $0.25 to, I think we have a couple of
packages that range up to $0.35. But a church basically could be live
streaming for $70, $75 a month, versus what they're having to pay with
other places.
So, that was our commitment, we got that out, but here's some pretty
interesting stuff. When we got into this, you hear the concept called
"simulated live", and simulated live is what LIFECHURCH.TV does, North
Point with Andy Stanley, and others. But it's also churches that maybe
don't have a full production team that want to do some post-production
edits and then they just want to take maybe a Saturday night service that
their pastor would preach and push that out Sunday and simulates it's the
same service. They can also do 24/7 programming during the week, so you can
see why this happened with churches.
When we decided to tackle that, we found out that there is no need to
charge bandwidth because we found that with Vimeo, they allow the ability
to where with your Vimeo Pro or Plus account you have basically unlimited
views of your videos. So the key was developing the advanced Akamai player
to be able to read based on a scheduled event and push the play head based
on when someone was coming to watch that video.
Chip: Got it.
Andy: Very innovative but, again, if someone doesn't want to do live
streaming but they wanted to broadcast 10 or 15 sermons like a television
channel, they could easily do that now with very minimal costs at the end
of the day.
Chip: Can they do both, Andy? They can do live and they can do simulated
live as well? Or they have to do one or the other?
Andy: No, you can do both. And what we see, our player basically, and
again, it's a point and click for us, is that they go, they set up a
schedule, it's almost like going in and looking at a television schedule,
and they're saying, "From 7:00 to 8:00 I'm going to play this video." And
it's going to ask you, "Is it a live video or simulated live?" So if you go
live, it's going to tie to my encoder at a certain time, so better push
that button when you're ready to broadcast. Or you're going to pull from a
previously recorded video and you just set it up like a television
schedule, and so people come in, they're able to see that.
Our players too, the way that we are dealing with Akamai, they had
servers inside of Facebook. So we're able to tap in -- this took months as
well -- but now when someone is watching live, they can actually take the
video from that church and embed it inside their Facebook so that anybody
who's on their friends section, you could say, "Hey, I'm watching a very
inspirational message today. This is amazing, you should join me." It goes
out to all their friends, which we know there's going to be some non-
Christians or some Christians that are maybe pulled away from the church,
they'll be able to click and watch it inside of Facebook live. So there are
some really cool things that are out there that will help a church grow,
help a church basically keep connected.
The pricing, we are aimed at it, we shot a bullet across the bow of
the major providers that are out there. So if anything, my hope is, A, that
we're able to get the gospel message streaming all over, a lot more than
what we see on the Internet today, but in many cases that maybe these other
vendors will begin to lower their prices because we got Akamai HD at $0.35.
We're selling the cheapest gas now on the four corners of a street corner.
Chip: Yeah, and you see this happening all over, you see it happen in the
mobile industry, you're going to see it happen probably in the
cable/Internet industry, so I think that you are leading the charge with
that. So, Andy, I really appreciate your time. Tell me how people can get
in contact with you if they're interested in your services, your website,
email, and phone number.
Andy: Yeah, they're easy. We built out the website to be a research website
for churches so when you go out to, it's mediafusionapp.com, you can call
us at 877-878-4007 and we have a full support team, we have an
international team too that deals with overseas folks. So, any of those
will get to us and we'll get them hooked up and they'll find out how easy
it is and they could be streaming this weekend for services within a few
minutes.
Chip: Well, hey, that's great. Hey, I appreciate your time and I will
definitely tell some people about your app, I want to test it as well to
see. And I thank you for your time and best wishes for your company and for
spreading the gospel, because this is my passion and from what you told me
Andy: Thank you so much, it's great meeting you and, yeah, we'll definitely
stay connected. And yeah, sign up for a free account, that's the other
thing. First 30 days, go out there and kick it around, we have nothing to
hide. And so we built a take product so if it works for somebody, we expect
them to go run but there's no barrier to that.
Chip: Great. Okay.