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Live Watchnight Service Broadcast

I attend Kemnay Parish Church in Aberdeenshire, Scotland.  We have an annual Watchnight service which takes place on Christmas Eve and ends just after Christmas Day has started.  Towards the end of 2014 we have been considering how we can make is more easy for people who, for some reason, cannot attend Church to do so virtually.  On this occasion it was agreed to have this service broadcast on the internet so that people could listen in on their computer or other mobile internet connected device.

In order to achieve this we partnered with Gospel4Grampian which is an internet radio station based in Aberdeen, Scotland.  We also made use of the Wireless Network link which was recently installed between the Church and Church Centre which are about 350 meters apart but with a good clear line of sight.

The transmission worked very well and nine people actually tuned in – this was very encouraging considering that we did not do anything to promote the experiment on this occasion.  The following screen shot shows the G4G listeners over the 24 hour period which included the Kemnay Watchnight Service.  See the peak of listeners at around midnight.G4G24hrNotice also below another view of this which focuses on the period when the service was actually taking place.G4G-KemnayWatchNight2014

From this we can see that people started to tune in about 22:40 with listeners peaking at about 23:40 – the routine for this event is that we sing Carols from 23:00 for 30 minutes and then the formal service begins at 23:30.  So it was very encouraging to see that 8 people were listening whilst the bulk of the formal service was taking place.  Also notice that  during the period shown in the graph that we had a total of 20 listeners with 12 from the United States, 7 from the United Kingdom and 1 from France.

All in all this was encouraging and shows that people will listen if we broadcast our service live in this way.  Gospel4Grampian has a listener base which covers a wide range of countries all over the world.  I think that we will be repeating this in the future – but next time we may announce and promote the broadcast using email and also social media.

You can listen to any of the Kemnay Parish Church by accessing the church web site which is at the following address www.kemnaykirk.org.uk.

The podcast archive can be accessed directly here http://www.kemnaykirk.org.uk/assets/podcast/KemnayKirkPodcast.xml

I will write here again when we do our next online experiment.