Written by: Nathan Clark in Local Sites, Simples Churches, Online, Media and Technology, Media and Technology on September 18, 2010

Last week we launched a Northland Roku Channel. What is Roku? In the last years a number of set-top video content devices have hit the consumer market. You can use any of these - Apple TV, Vudu, Roku, Tivo, Slingbox, etc - to watch channels of video programming without cable or satellite. All the content is sent over the Internet to the device. Some is on-demand and some is live, some is free and some is either available by subscription or per video. But generally after the one-time hardware costs you get a cheaper way to watch just the content you want.

A big part of our online worship strategy is connecting people who leave in proximity with each other to share in their worship experience. But gathering around a laptop isn’t a very natural way to congregate. Using cable to hook a laptop to a TV works, but it’s complicated for a lot of people and most of the time I try my computer ends up precariously positioned on some chair or ledge. These set top boxes are small and simple to connect to a TV. They allow anyone, regardless of technical savvy, to connect a device to a tv that can deliver content from the Web.

We’ve actually been doing this for a while. For years Northland has used Slingboxes to deliver high quality video content to house churches. The Slingbox gave us a great initial solution to deliver video that looked great and was easy to deliver to a television. Anyone could connect a Slingbox to their tv and after a little configuration they could connect on the weekends for the live service. But every Slingbox receiving a signal in a home required another machine at Northland sending. So 10 house churches meant we needed 20 machines and at $150-200 a device, the cost wasn’t scalable.

For the last 18 months we’ve been hoping to find a better way to send a single signal to multiple set-top boxes. When the Roku was announced we realized we finally had a good match: An affordable (sub-$100) set-top box that was easy to setup.  We were just hoping for a device that was simpler to configure than Slingbox, but Roku exceeded that hope too. After a little work with our XML feed, we were able to create a full-blown channel that we could immediately start publishing. So instead of easily connecting with the dozen house churches we’re connected with, every person who has a Roku receives Northland’s content as one of their 51 channels (at time of post).

The video that sends to the Roku is the same that you can get from our high bandwidth stream at northlandchurch.net during the live services. You don’t get different video. But with the box you get a dead simple way to put that content on a tv screen, which we hope makes it easier to invite friends and family to join in worship with you. So far we’ve had about 800 people start using the Roku channel. After this weekend a few of them will be using the channel to support house churches.

Two of our staff are visiting with three house churches this weekend to help some house churches set up Rokus for a better communal worship experience. Marty Taylor, our media director, and Chris Gerrish will be bringing the set-top boxes to groups in Suncoast Mobile Home, Venice Beach and Ponce Inlet. We’re excited to get these three churches up and rolling with this new technology. We’re hoping that in the weeks to come many more come alongside them in developing house churches around the world.

If you have questions about the Roku stream - either how to install it or how to build one of your own - direct them to Chris Gerrish (chris.gerrish@northlandchurch.net) who spear-headed the efforts to create the Roku channel. You can buy a Roku box from roku.com or amazon.com.