Potential Alternative to Teradek VidiU for Meetinghouse Webcasts

[james.crawford]

I wanted to share a product we found as we are bringing two of the meeting houses in our Stake online to start webcasting sacrament meetings. We've had the Teradek VidiU installed at the Stake Center for several years now and it's worked well for us. When we went to source parts for our other buildings we ran into the same thing many of you have run into - the VidiU is discontinued and replaced with a much more expensive model from Teradek. The church store does stock the less expensive VidiU Pro at times, but did not have any available at the time. It seemed like the VidiU Pro (the replacement for the original VidiU we have) was only available second-hand on places like eBay. We found the Magewell Ultra Stream HDMI was available for about $360 each, and seemed like a solid alternative to the VidiU. We've now done several tests with the Magewell unit and I can say it works great, both with the church webcast system and YouTube Live. It does support Facebook Live also, however we haven't tested that. The unit comes in an HDMI or SDI model with the SDI one usually a bit more. We feed our sound system audio into the analog Mic In port on the front. There is a smartphone app that will connect to the encoder via WiFi or bluetooth to allow configuring settings and starting/stopping the stream, making it relatively simple for members to manage that during the webcast. Another nice feature is you can connect it to a WiFi network, or install a 3G/LTE USB modem and it can fail over to those connections if needed. We felt this may come in handy with one of our buildings being in a rural setting with a somewhat intermittent ISP coming into the building.

There are several great ideas out there, I just thought I would add our experience to them. Let me know if you have any questions on the setup and I would be happy to share. I'll be sure to follow up after our first webcasts go Live and let you know if we ran into any issues with it. Thanks!