As I said in my article only 1 in 10 Sydney Anglicans have ever downloaded a podcast let alone a vodcast. It’s a niche market.

Good questions Jeremy.

I’d suggest that this figure would certainly be much larger the younger the demographic, and one of your other stats supports this idea. That is, the podcast “market” is only going to increase as time goes on.

But let me make another point - my own experience suggests that the figure itself would be *much* higher amongst those who are in full time ministry, or who are training for full time ministry. Every pastor, MTS or theolog student I know has listened to sermons off the net - and most do so regularly.

So “tomorrow” podcasts will be the domain of the masses - but even “today”, they are the domain of the leadership, of the “upstream” if you like. By preaching into this market, you are influencing the influencers.

20 years ago, just about everyone I knew in leadership used to buy tapes from Matthias and listen to Phillip Jensen preach. That’s why Phillip had such a massive influence over the current generation of leadership.

These days, *every* college student and MTS that I know (and I know a lot) listens to John Piper (and, to a lesser extent, Mark Driscoll). I hardly know anyone who buys sermons anymore.

That’s one of the reasons we are working hard to put as much of Dominic’s teaching up on the net as possible, and making it as accessable as possible. To deliberately be in a position to contribute to, and influence, the conversation.

We don’t make any money directly from it. But we have certainly had many people come to church because they’ve listened to our podcast and liked what they heard. So the investment of time has probably already paid for itself. But I think the future returns are going to be massive…

Re: Online comunity

[quote author="Brett Hall"]I wonder perhaps if it’s not so much that young people prefer to relate to one another in this manner, but whether it’s out of necessity.

Interesting observation, but I wonder whether if, in turn, the necessity of communicating by these means becomes habit of communicating by these means, which becomes a practice of treating these forms of communication as having a higher priority.

I can’t count the number of times people have broken off a conversation with me to respond to an sms…

...or maybe I should just have a good, hard look at my conversation skills?

[quote author="Jeremy Halcrow"]In my view people [currently] see it is an active tool, not a passive medium where they just watch or listen to something like TV or radio broadcast. My question is whether this ‘active’ use of the new media is inate, inbedded in the nature of the medium?? Or will people alter their behaviour as connection speeds improve with better technology??

I think this is observation is on to something.
My thought would be that people see the attraction of the Internet as not just being “active”, but in particular interactive.
And with the increase in connection speeds etc, there won’t I suspect, be a change to accepting “passive” content, but rather an expectation of a more interactive experience.

my concern and i understand that there are 2 conversations going on here
is that of the words we use and what they represent and legitamise

the words community and relationship i believe have at there heart both the good and the bad of humanity the miricale of church is that i woulod meet with thoose people physically becasue i have to experiance both the good of that meeting and the bad

my concern as I watch generations of people grow is tools like the internet negate the recursive relationship of church of real community.  what i mean is as my kids at school here relate in the school community they carry that relationship over to the net at night, however when there are disagrements and agression the litteral choose not to relate to thoose people on the net thus breaking community something that they really cannot do in a real community.

i am not concerned about the present discussion of church plus the net but of the way we speak if the plus net leading us into a maybe anti relational formate

just a thought?

Just on the Driscoll front, check out this column by John Sandeman - http://your.sydneyanglicans.net/indepth/articles/preaching_attitude_to_postmoderns/

RE: podcast. Thanks for the reply Craig. Good point about ministry leadership.

There is definately a place for our best Syd Ang preachers using podcasting to speak to the world. It is great that PDF, PFJ and Dominic can use this technology becuase they have international profiles which will attract new listeners. But I do question whether investing too much energy in pod/vodcasting is worthwhile for most churches.

Regarding the use of podcasts by younger users, you are right Craig but we have to acknowledge that usage is very low across the board compared to the use of say other internet tools like forums, blogs and chat. Indeed I was surprised that we did not find a higher usage by under 30s. In fact, the user group fo podcasting was too small to find a statistically valid difference between age groups. This is why I could not report that data. I quoted the most positive stat there was.

OK what can I say about podcasting and young people? Well even amongst under 30s your maximum potential user group is only going to be less than one quarter of that age group. A savvy congregation like CiTM are probably the exception that proves the rule. Even amongst under 30s the majority of people are either a) not comfortable enough with the technology or b) couldn’t be bothered taking the time to download material.

The latter point is also seen in the result that in every age group the number of occassional users is twice the regular user group. (apart from the over 65 aged group where less than 1% of people over 65 have ever heard a podcast!)

Podcasting is not a medium for reaching the majority of people (unlike TV which is what makes the CiTM/ACC initiative so exciting)

Sean said:

i am not concerned about the present discussion of church plus the net but of the way we speak if the plus net leading us into a maybe anti relational formate

hmmm. I feel there is a false dichotomy that is often set up between the ‘real’ world and ‘real’ relationships and what happens on-line.

The net is part of the real world. There is no seperation.

I have a relationship with Craig Schwarze built up fom many years of sharing conversations on this forum, even though we have never met face-to-face. In fact it’s a deeper relationship than I have with the many people I meet face to face through work. Granted it’s not as intimate as the relationship I have with my wife or kids - but so what! ;)

I think the real question you are asking Sean is whether we can truly love other people if we can not have the kind of physical bond and connection we get in a church community. However, I think we can love other people in many different ways, in many different contexts. As David Horne said in his article on-line Christian community can be used to supplement, but not replace, physical Christian community especially in the light of our fast-paced modern lifestyle which is undermining our physical Christian communities.

[edit for clarity]

Interesting points Jeremy - were you including normal audio downloads in the figure, or just those that are technically a “podcast” (ie. they use an RSS feed)?

But you may well be right even so. Thinking back to my youth, it was probably only 20% or so of people who were buying sermons from Matthias - but these 20% were inevitably leaders or future leaders.

I think digital convergence (where traditional media and new media combine) will shake things up. This is already a reality in parts of the US and Europe where they are not bandwidth challenge like Oz.

Oh, and my experience is similar to yours with regards to friendships over the net. I have met and made many friends that way. I don’t consider them “virtual” friendships - they are real relationships.

Someone pointed out that in older days a lot of friendship was carried on via correspondence, so the present situation is perhaps not as unique as people think.

Interesting points Jeremy - were you including normal audio downloads in the figure, or just those that are technically a “podcast” (ie. they use an RSS feed)?

Good question Craig.

Looking back at the question, we asked specifically about ‘podcasting’ with no mention of ‘audio downloads’.

These kinds of quantative surveys rely on self-reporting so if people think they are listening to podcasts then they will mark ‘yes’ even if they are actually refering to a normal audio download.

We would need to do qualitative research like focus groups to drill any further down behind these stats.

I guess that is one of the problems with researching the public on new media - people’s understanding of the terminology can be a little fluid.

For sure. Technically speaking, I listen to very few “podcasts” - I mostly download the files individually (from audio libraries etc) rather than depend upon an RSS feed.

[quote author="David Horne"]Gidday Terry,

[quote author="Terry Gallagher"]More generally, I see that there is a great opportunity with new media to
make our communications more effective by taking into account the reality of multiple learning styles and shortish attention spans.

Not only that but the internet is breeding a generation of people who take their information in quick bite size chunks - simple and to the point.

I think there is also a need for short Christian “teasers” - small thought provoking images/video/audio clips designed to get people thinking. The sort of thing that could be spread virally. What do you think Dominic?

Dear David, Terry,

I think that you are right. But, we may be talking about two different things though.  One a bite size teaching moment - for watching online/podcasting.  And the other an issue raiser to use in a small group/church meeting (but checkoutable/downloadable).

On the second, I think there is an enormous need for ‘video topic raisers.’ This was one of the things we did with Introducing God (a three minute multimedia topic raiser followed by a presentation).  Interestingly whether or not people have used the DVD talks or done the talks live ALL have used the multi media ‘topic raisers.’

Andrew Barry has found some good sites from the USA that have downloadable files of these - but most they have American accents. 

Jeremy is also right in that that explains the high demand for the Nooma videos.  I have criticised the theology of those videos.  But as well as being critical of that we should work to produce videos with good theology and good production values.

So we are intending to make some of these ‘topic raisers’ for our own use and then to make them available to anyone on line. 

On the first, I’ll give some thought to that. Piper is doing it on the desiringgod.org site - providing full length talks, and then shorter bite sized chunks (this would be quite cheap to provide).  And I did like Mark Driscoll’s short bit for pastors here (this is obviously more expensive) - but very very viewable.

We are in the process of putting together a video package to help pastors and churches on the great Reformation Truths. 

We are envisaging two uses.  In small groups there will be a series of video interviews with people about how they understood each of these ideas.  Then there will be a talk.  Then participants handbook discussion questions and a short article.  Then if people wish they could watch the question time from the talk.

The alternative use might be that the pastor might choose to do the series in church, use the interviews on video, preach the series himself, use the discussion booklet for tie in midweek studies etc.

(The video talks of ‘Ideas that Changed the World’ on our website at the moment are first draft rough cuts of all of this).  We haven’t yet put on the opening closing titles, interviews, proper openers etc - or even finished making the video editing like we want it to be.

We are seeing this as part of a longer process.  We want to make creative stuff that we want to use for our teaching ministry at Christians in the Media/Annandale but to make everything that we can available and customisable for others if they did want to use it - so that people don’t have to invent the wheel all over again.

The media’s a very tough place to be Christian - and lots of Christians in the Media go backwards in Christ.  But if they are together encouraging each other to stay Christian - when they start to go forwards - they start to want to make things - and thus serve the wide body of Christ.

About the future use of downloadable stuff.

When we started to investigate vodcasting we discovered that Apple had put out new recommendations to vodcasters about file sizes (much bigger than the old recommendations).

1. If you’re encoding your video podcast at 320x240, please increase the resolution to either 640x480 or 640x360 (depending on the aspect ratio of your source files). Why? Because video podcasts at this resolution look great on Apple TV and still port to video iPods. Lower resolution podcasts might also work on both platforms, but they don’t look nearly as good on a widescreen TV.

This implies to me that they see itunes as heading towards distributing content more and more to full screen TV’s. 

We initially uploaded our first few programs up at this size, but the files are four times as big (and so too big for Australian download limits and speeds.)

So we took them down again and replaced them with smaller files - using Apple’s old recoomended file sizes - which are more acceptable in Australia. 

But I imagine that down the track - as the bandwidth gets cheaper and faster all content providers will have to replace their current vodcast files with larger better quality files - that people can watch on their TV’s on demand.

ps we premiere this Friday night at 6pm on the Australian Christian Channel (Foxtel, Optus and Channel 46 on the Digital Set Top Box)

Re: Online comunity

[quote author="David Horne"][quote author="Brett Hall"]I tend to fall in with the line of thought that young people are craving for meaningful face-to-face relationship, but instead compromise for the closest thing they can get. That’s my own experience at least.

I can’t deny that the way younger people are relating is changing significantly, and that it’s something that needs to be addressed in terms of how we preach the Gospel, but I think it’s an excessively broad assumption that there is a preference for this form of communication.

Brett,

I take your point - ‘prefer’ is probably too strong a word. I am not GenY but am trying to understand them. So tell me in what ways do you think we should change the way we preach the gospel?

Dave

From reading the ‘Brave New World’ article, I think you’re probably already hitting the nail on the head.

My point was not so much that young people aren’t using the technology to comunicate, but more around the connotations of the word ‘prefer’.

I appreciate the difference that you’ve pointed out between using technology to enhance community, rather than being solely dependant on it as a form of e-church.

I wish I could tell you more about how to reach GenY, but I struggle myself in trying to understand/relate to others my own age; I’m actually a bit of a church geek, even amongst my Christian friends.

Though, from talking to a couple of my mates from before I became a Christian, they don’t seem to be looking for anything that we don’t really already think about: They want to believe in something that sounds plausible, and has relevance to their lives, as well as be included in a community of people that care about them. I guess one of the best things we can do is start taking our own individual walks with God, and understanding more about him through his word, more seriously.

Do we just video the talk we would have given anyway? or should the form of the sermon vary because of the medium? Here’s how one Episcopalian minister is experimenting with a sermon mash-up style.
http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=FatherMatthew
You might start with his diversity sermon. Warning for those who only like seeing stuff they agree with: extremely Liberal theology

John, that’s a very good point. Perhaps there is a place for online teaching that complements the sermon somehow, using a different style…

Regarding our TV program, we should acknowledge that a number of people have been remarkably generous in enabling it to happen. May God grant them every kind of blessing!

A question for Dave Horne.

I’m still not 100% clear on why we can’t have e-church if online we can:

1. Meet around God’s word regularly with the same people.
2. Listen to God’s Word being exegeted
3. Fellowship and pray with this regular group.
4. Love and support the members of this group

OK sacraments are a bit tougher

I guess it comes back to your ecclesiology - so I’d love to tease this out further…