An Apple TV for Every Church Lobby

Okay, here’s the problem: the men’s Backyard UFC Ministry (B.U.M. for short) wants to create an announcement slide to advertise their upcoming Backyard Brawl. Seriously, have you ever noticed that every ministry wants a slide for their deal? Maybe it’s because everybody knows that announcement slides and videos are always the best and only way to recruit and get the word out, second only to emails and Evite. (I hope you caught the sarcasm there)

Anyway, back to my fun little antidote: the BUMs eventually create this really sweet announcement slide and email it to your church’s tech guy who then adds it to PowerPoint or ProPresenter for worship…but WHAT ABOUT THE LOBBY? Everybody knows that you must have announcements in the lobby!

If your church has a building…no big deal. Just have your resident community college computer nerd permanently install cat cable in the walls, buy a VGA converter, video amp and hub computer and you’re  golden. But what about if you’re portable? Your landlord is not likely to smile upon the prospect of fishing wire through their drywall for a solid week.

The solution: Apple TV and Flickr!

Apple TV has a great built-in feature that allows you to create a repeating slideshow from a Flickr photo set. (this is more amazing than you could know for us portable-church types) Translation: during the week, your tech guy (or anybody with your Flickr password) can upload an announcement slide to the appropriate Flickr photoset and instantly your lobby’s announcement rotation is created and ready to go. AMAZING!

If you want, you could even have different photosets for different TV’s in the lobby. We have one Apple TV for our Next Step booth and one for our Small Group Connection. Each Apple TV is accessing a different Flickr photoset.

Here’s the other big win: the folks in the lobby do not have to have their masters degree in computer science to run your announcements. They simply turn on the Apple TV and select the appropriate Flickr account…DONE. Also, the Apple TV menu functions just like that of an iPod. It couldn’t be easier.

The only trick is to make sure your announcement slides are designed to match the specifications of your lobby’s plasma tvs. (that may take a little experiementing on the front end)

Here’s one of our announcement slides as well as a link to our Flickr Photostream: