Storage made
for Sundays
By RaeAnn Slaybaugh
If you’re like me, you’re not well-versed in “collaborative
media storage.”
You might assume (like I did), That’s for the AV or IT staff to
think about.
While it’s true your content creation and live production teams
use collaborative media (video) storage most, there are three really
good reasons that you — as a church executive — should be
involved in its selection.
But first: why churches?
A member of Saddleback Church for nearly 20 years, Sean Busby,
president and co-owner of DigitalGlue and creative.space, says the release
of Rick Warren’s The Purpose Driven Life impacted him hugely. Given his
24/7/365 business commitments — servicing the broadcast television
network industry with customers like FOX News, The CW, Trinity
Broadcasting, and American Forces Network —
Busby volunteered at the church in the only way he
could manage: parking cars.
In 2003, a friend introduced him to Life.
Church pastor Bobby Gruenewald, who was
committed to simultaneously sharing the
sermon given at the main campus with two new
locations. “I immediately realized we were on
Sean Busby
President
DigitalGlue and
creative.space
the same mission,” Busby says. Later that year,
the Life.Church satellite network was up and
running.
Soon, others — Mars Hill in Seattle, Lake
Pointe Church in Rockwall, Texas, and Church
Unlimited in Corpus Christi, Texas, to name just a few — inquired
about building the same type of network. But there were only so many
churches intent on going this expansive.
Fast forward to today, with Busby’s release of an enterprise-based
video storage system as simple to use as an iPhone and ideally suited
to churches: the //ROGUE.
“With it, a church’s video team is finally able to collaborate quicker,
producing better and more content than ever before at a price that has
never been possible,” he explains. “For me, that incredible feeling of
giving back is back.”
Room for improvement
Before we dive deeper into this new option, let’s look at your current
collaborative media setup.
According to Busby, most churches don’t realize the impact that
storage has on their content. Not having proper media storage ends
up hurting the ability of editors and other creatives to make the best
content. Instead of focusing on the message, teams are interrupted
by laggy playback. When they want to collaborate, they have to copy
data, which takes even more time away from focusing on what’s
important. Technical problems become creative problems. Storage
becomes “collaborative” once teams are able to work together without
interrupting their creative flow.
“A lot of different software goes into providing a seamless experience,”
Busby explains. “And the manufacturers leave it up to the IT team or the
church’s systems integrator to work it out.”
Even with an IT staff, it can be difficult to diagnose issues as they
arise. So, your church ends up paying for an engineer to troubleshoot
in person.
Which brings us to the first reason to consider a new kind of
collaborative storage solution…
Incentive #1: You don’t need an IT team to manage it
As Busby explains, the creative.space software makes it easy for your
team to manage day-to-day operations with advanced monitoring and
analytics that trigger proactive support. Plus, creative.space support
manages technical issues that would normally require a dedicated IT
person to resolve.
The user(s) you choose to give administrator rights will have
full access to the system and deep control over space use and user
management. “So, the question is more about who should be making
decisions,” Busby points out. “Whoever it is, we can get them up-tospeed
during the orientation call.”
Incentive #2: Getting collaborative storage right drives
significant cost and time savings
Usually, to get a collaborative storage solution, the storage alone
costs tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars. Then,
there’s IT staff, the Ethernet network infrastructure, and the annual
service contracts to pay for — not to mention “refreshing” your setup
every five years.
By contrast, creative.space bundles hardware, software and support
into a single operational expense service (OpEx) paid monthly or
annually. The cost often ends up being less expensive than just the
annual support investment of traditional storage solutions.
As mentioned earlier, Busby recommends the //ROGUE for most
churches. Designed for two to four users, it features a portable
design that can support either 48 or 64 terabytes (TB) of raw storage
capacity; usable is 31TB and 41TB respectively. (For context, you could
fit about 500 hours’ worth of video on 1 TB.) Uniquely, it’s the only
system available for purchase — versus a managed service — and is
currently offered at 0% interest financing for 24 months starting
at $199 a month. This includes a free year of proactive creative.
space support.
For larger teams, the //AUTEUR storage solution is a creative.space
managed service. The entry-level system starts at 120 TB for $995 a
month based on a three-year contract paid annually. This system can
be modularly upgraded to more than 1 petabyte (PB) raw in drive
space. (1 PB is equal to 1,000 TB.)
Incentive #3: The right solution ramps up your team’s
creativity — and that drives engagement
Collaborative storage is all about ease of use and removing
interruptions on your team’s day-to-day activities caused by
technology. “As the amount of data they’re working with grows, those
interruptions start changing from minutes to hours or even days,”
Busby cautions.
With the right solution, they can maximize their limited time by
focusing on the work that really matters and producing a higherquality
final product. This translates to better engagement with
churchgoers — and increased efficiency to do it more often.
By now, you’ve had a crash course on collaborative storage and why
your current solution is almost certainly not the best possible option. If
you want to talk about what a transition might look like for your church
(in plain English!), reach out to the DigitalGlue team at 888.519.2021,
email [email protected], or visit www.creative.space/contact.
14 CHURCH EXECUTIVE | MAY / JUNE 2020