If I get something wrong in the middle of a service, how bad is it?

Most mistakes are one click to undo and nobody in the room notices. The parts that would be visible to the congregation are the ones locked while you are live, so a stray click cannot interrupt what is on screen.

Do I need to understand how any of this works to use it?

No. It was built for the volunteer who never asked to be technical, by someone who has never worked as a professional developer. If a feature needs explaining before it can be used, that is a fault in the feature.

What does Broadcasteer do worse than the established presentation software?

Fewer templates, fewer years of polish, and a smaller library of things other people have already built for you. What it does better is run the whole Sunday from one app on one laptop instead of four programs and a rack of gear.

A switcher, presentation, streaming and recording in one app sounds like it must be worse at all four. Is it?

For a production house with a broadcast engineer, probably yes, and they should buy the dedicated tools. For a volunteer running everything alone, four adequate things that already talk to each other beat four excellent things that do not.

Why build this at all when good software already exists?

Because the good software assumes someone who does this for a living. Twenty years in a church AV booth is twenty years of watching volunteers carry a load that kept growing, and one of them eventually leaves. That is the problem being solved, not the feature list.

What happens if the internet drops in the middle of a stream?

Screens already watching keep playing from what they have buffered, and the stream picks back up on its own when the connection returns. Your local screens do not depend on the internet at all.

Does it need a fast computer or a fast connection?

It starts on the laptop you already own. More cameras, higher quality and streaming all add load, so what you need grows with what you ask of it rather than being a fixed minimum.

I said Complete, but Ready is the word

A celebration

Tomorrow, the 10th of September, marks six months since Broadcasteer started. From the first specifications drawn, to the first prompt, to now.

I didn't know what I was signing up for. All I had in mind was another app, something like EasyWorship, but one that supported phones connected to it as live feed cameras. That was the whole idea.

Jokes aside, it wasn't even called Broadcasteer back then. It was "The Production".

It has a name

Nope, Broadcasteer isn't in the dictionary. Not Oxford, not dictionary.com. I made it up.

I thought about the role someone plays doing the visuals on a Sunday. Presents... nope, taken, we already have Presenter. So I went a notch higher... Broadcast. Then I borrowed the "eer" from engineer. And it stuck.

Broadcasteer: someone who broadcasts. Plainly.

Names are very important. Just like how we named our children, reflecting who we see in each one of them. Just like how God gave Abram a new name, Abraham.

Little did I know, Broadcasteer would extend the vision I initially had in mind further than I expected.

Everything, almost

If we take a closer look at Broadcasteer today, it has almost everything.

It started with the core. Switcher... that solves not needing an ATEM Mini. It wasn't cheap, and it isn't for churches without a budget.

Then the presentation layer, easier to use than ProPresenter. Did I tell you it took me a week to canvas up a single song? Not a fan. I remembered EasyWorship, and how easy it was when I started using it many, many years ago. It should feel like that. It has to be as convenient as PowerPoint. Today it can do almost everything a presentation needs to do.

Live Stream. I literally gave up on OBS. I know, that's what many others are using, and in this day and age there are so many tutorials on YouTube I could learn from. It isn't difficult to pick up something new, something I only use on Sundays. It wasn't difficult. But it was hard.

Recording. Being a casual photographer myself, I understand how important footage and coverage are. Broadcasteer had to be able to record the mix, what got switched, and the raw feeds too.

Relay. Think evangelism, think outreach... that was how we packed in Campus, and Stream Cloud too.

But the two below are the ones that get overlooked.

Confidence monitors

I lead worship sessions once a month in my local church. We have this confidence monitor thing. We used to have one big screen at the back of the hall, and now it's two TVs on the left and right, mid-hall.

I'm mid-40s. I can't read the screens at all.

Could be the distance from the stage. Could be the size of the screen. Could be the formatting. I don't know. I fall back onto printed hardcopies instead.

So yes, with Broadcasteer, we made sure every screen can be seen... by the people on the stage, by the booth, and by the elderly uncle or auntie at the last pew.

Control

Communication is one thing. Control is another.

It is hard controlling the slides without knowing how the worship leader speaks. And some of them, either they are strapped with a guitar, or they just don't use hand signals at all. Same goes for speakers, invited or not. Unless they go "next slide", it is either disruptive, or the poor guy or girl behind the screen gets the blame, if not the shame.

Everyone accounted for.

Complete, or ready?

For a while I thought Broadcasteer was complete. Everything on the list was built. Everything worked.

Then it ran a real service, and I learned that complete is a narrow word. Complete only means I ran out of features to add. Ready means it holds... when a projector gets switched on mid-service, when the upload goes soft halfway through, when someone closes the browser they shouldn't have.

Those aren't features. You can't put them on a list and tick them off. You only find them by running real Sundays and fixing what breaks.

Six months in, I don't think Broadcasteer is complete. I think it's ready. That's the better word, and it's the harder one to earn.

Broadcasteer. Worship without walls.