TruthBook Religious News Blog

By Franz Klein
Catholic News Service

LA CROSSE, Wis

Streaming video is all the rage on the Internet, and some people are starting to realize how valuable a tool this technology can be in reaching out to young Catholics.

If St. Augustine were alive today, he "would have done his 'Confessions' in video and streamed it on the Internet," Travis Boudreaux, the tech-savvy Louisiana Catholic who founded Catholic-Tube.com several months ago, told The Catholic Times, newspaper of the Diocese of La Crosse.

On his Catholic-Tube blog, Boudreaux posts daily some of what he considers the best Catholic videos and podcasts uploaded to major sites such as YouTube.com and GodTube.com, as well as smaller Catholic operations such as LoveToBeCatholic.com and SQPN.com.

A veteran Web watcher, Boudreaux believes that video is the future of the Internet.

"There will always be room for audio and the written word, but video provides a dynamic that's not there otherwise," he said. "Imagine if you could see St. Augustine's emotion. There's so much that's lost without voice inflection and hand gestures."

YouTube.com was created in 2005 and was bought by Google Inc. in October 2006. According to Alexa.com's statistical analysis, YouTube is currently the third most frequented Web site on the Internet.

On YouTube, users can upload, view and share music videos and television clips, as well as video content of their own creation. More than 65 million videos have been uploaded to date. While no pornographic or nude videos are permitted, YouTube relies on its community of viewers to identify and flag such uploads, meaning there is a definite time lag before they come down.

A quick search of YouTube's contents for "Christian" will return a staggering 329,000-plus videos, while a search for "Catholic" will yield 21,000-plus results.

Several bishops use the site, including Philadelphia's Cardinal Justin Rigali, who posted a series of reflections, and Toronto Archbishop Thomas Collins, whose monthly "Lectio Divina" meditations have been watched by thousands of viewers.

But nearly half of the videos on the first page of search results for "Christianity" portray the faith in a negative light. And while a search for "Catholic" will yield an inspirational video by "KaterinaMarie" called "Why I am Catholic," and a clip of a Mass with Bishop Fulton Sheen in 1941 among its initial results, there's also a video parodying the church sex abuse scandals, as well as many others that are anti-Catholic or contain salacious material.

"That's why we believe biblical topics need to be discussed in a forum that is respectful of the Word," GodTube.com co-founder and chief executive officer Chris Wyatt said in a Catholic Times interview.

With its first version launched last January, GodTube's quick growth has been phenomenal. The site, which recently added an alternative to the secular networking site Facebook.com, already contains more than 48,000 videos. Wyatt said the site logged more than 10 million visitors by the end of 2007.

But accusations of anti-Catholicism have plagued GodTube, as some users have posted videos that try to discredit the church's teaching on the priesthood, the sacraments, the papacy and other things.

Wyatt, a Baptist, said anti-Catholicism would not be tolerated. "We don't stand for that," he said, although he admitted there were some anti-Catholic videos on the site until a recent string of articles brought them to the company's attention.

Even with these videos removed, clips claiming to discredit elements of Catholic teaching remain on the site, including a John MacArthur lecture series on "The Pope and the Papacy."

Thomas Hall, founder of LoveToBeCatholic.com, believes he has come up with a better alternative.

"About a month ago, I typed 'Catholic' in on YouTube, and six of the first 10 responses were anti-Catholic propaganda," Hall told The Catholic Times. "I felt Catholics needed an equal voice and a safe environment to learn about their faith and to evangelize."

With a background including Web work with Fortune 500 companies, Hall, who just moved from Chicago with his family to Minneapolis, naturally turned to the Internet.

At the end of October, he launched LoveToBeCatholic.com as a test. Like YouTube and GodTube, LoveToBeCatholic is a Web platform for people to post videos. But unlike them, LoveToBeCatholic is specifically Catholic, and Hall works to ensure that nothing anti-Catholic gets posted.

Hall said the online Catholic community has embraced his site. "In the first month I went from zero to 3,000 visitors per day," he said. "I immediately ran into bandwidth problems. I've had to upgrade the servers twice, and I'll have to do that again this year. But that's a really nice problem to have."

Videos range from priests' sermons to humorous skits and church events. Some of Hall's favorites are vocations videos that show young religious in habits engaged in sports or other activities with youths. "You can't capture that in text or audio," he said.

Labels: Catholic, Catholic-Tube, Franz Klein, Godtube.com, YouTube

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Friday, September 21, 2007

The ascension of GodTube: What took this long?

Posted Sep 20th 2007 11:10AM
by Barry Summerlin

Web watcher comScore Inc. has reported that last month, the new site GodTube.com saw traffic climb 973% -- growth unprecedented in the web's history.

Owned and operated by Big Jump Media, Inc., GodTube is exactly what you might guess -- a Christian alternative to Google (NASDAQ: GOOG)'s YouTube. In six weeks, it has accumulated more than 20,000 user-submitted clips and streamed more than 800,000 hours of video.

It's fascinating that here we are nearly two decades into the internet, and only now does a dominant faith-oriented web destination start to take shape.

But the opportunity has surely always been there. Since the heyday of Usenet, determined faithful have been debating and witnessing, huddling together on message boards or tugging back and forth on Wikipedia entries.

Just to give you an idea of how often web-going Americans reach to religion, consider these figures from Google. Shown here are the relative volumes of searches for "God," "Jesus," "church" and "Britney Spears," the latter our control for this experiment, chosen since she's the most veteran resident of Lycos' weekly list of 50 most searched people, places and things:

But for occasional spikes, Miss Britney typically places lower than the first three terms, giving some perspective on how in demand she really is (or isn't). Good on GodTube's backers -- who include Norm Miller, chairman of privately-held Interstate Batteries -- for answering that demand for faith with YouTube's viral recipe.

How long can GodTube maintain this growth? That's a question for its users. As is the case with YouTube and other startup smashes like eBay (NASDAQ: EBAY) and News Corp (NYSE: NWS)'s MySpace, GodTube is just a meeting place, tasking its unpaid community with the bother of generating content, not to mention policing its appropriateness for the site, which is likely to be an enduring issue of contention.

Labels: Barry Summerlin, Christianity, Godtube.com, religion, video

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Sunday, September 09, 2007

High-tech focus on higher power

September 8, 2007
Associated Press

Godtube.com is just what it sounds like: Youtube, but only for Christian content

ANDERSON, Ind. -- On any Sunday morning, members of Faith Church in Anderson expect to sing several hymns and listen as Walt Weaver preaches. They also expect to watch some TV without leaving their pews.

Weaver has been sprinkling his services with multiple video clips for more than a year.

More churches are turning to new technology in the hope that it will engage their congregations and stop the national decline in church attendance.

Godtube.com, a new Christian video-sharing site, makes it possible for people to bypass the bricks and mortar and experience their faith in a completely digital format.

The site hosts more than 20,000 clips. They range from amateur home videos to professionally produced television segments, and they include sermons, music videos, comedy bits and infomercials.

Like Youtube.com, Godtube allows anyone to share a video. But videos on Godtube must pertain to Christianity.

Many religious sites have copied nonreligious models. My Church.org is similar to the social networking site MySpace.

More than any other religious Web site, Godtube seems to be billing itself as an alternative to the physical church. A release from the company cited statistics on declining church attendance and a Pew Internet Study that found 82 million Americans use the Internet for a faith-based reason, which is more than the number of Americans who use it for banking or dating.

Weaver said his congregation bucks that national trend and hasn't seen its membership decline. And although he likes Godtube for the videos it provides, he said the site also makes him nervous for the impact it could have on future attendance.

"We like to think of ourselves as the Switzerland of Christianity," said Christopher Wyatt, Godtube's founder and CEO.

He officially launched the site on Aug. 8, but test versions have existed online since January. Within 60 days of going live, the site became the most popular Christian site on the Internet, Wyatt said.

Its growth has continued at a breakneck pace. In July, Godtube users watched about 300,000 hours of video. This month, Wyatt said, he expects them to watch close to 2 million hours.

A former TV producer with CBS, Wyatt now attends seminary school in Dallas. The idea for the site came to him after he learned of statistics describing future downward trends in church attendance.

He calls the trend of Christians going online and using new technology, such as file-sharing and streaming video, to experience their religion the "Jesus 2.0 movement."
But the movement is somewhat restricted due to Godtube's ban on anything it deems objectionable.

Labels: Christianity, Christopher Wyatt, church, Godtube.com, religion, social networking, video