URGENT: G-Suite Meet vs Zoom

[stephendoud]

I am a new STS. I was recently notified that our stake presidency will be reformed in 2 weeks, due to illness.
Needs:
The presiding authority wants to hold virtual interviews and a virtual adult Saturday night adult session (both require multi-directional webcasts). The Sunday morning session only needs to be a unidirectional webcast.
Saturday night and Sunday morn sessions to broadcast to chapels and member homes. At chapels, project the image and put audio on chapel sound system.
For Sunday morning session, I'm thinking of using the multi-directional system, but muting listener camera/mics.
Merge Tabernacle Choir music into the webcasts (music will be provided to me).

To ensure I don't waste sacred tithing, I explored this forum (Interactive Virtual Meetings) and learned about free Google G-Suite (now called Google Workspace) -> "MEET".
I need to know how many connections the Church G-Suite account allows (is the Church G-Suite account equivalent to Google Workspace Enterprise and enabling up to 250 connections (https://apps.google.com/meet/pricing/)), and whether the connection stream can be provided to the general membership for home connection, or if they all have to be invited to attend.
Also looking for any gotchas.

I am also exploring subscription to Small/Med Business-level Zoom, which offers 300 connections. I believe our stake can withdraw from the subscription before the end of the first month, and pay only $199.90 for the minimum 10 licenses/hosts (https://zoom.us/pricing) on the monthly billing plan. We have been using member accounts for Zoom for Sacrament and some Auxiliary meetings. I have been authorized to get a Zoom account for the Stake, if that's the direction I choose.

As I have less than 2 weeks to get this off the ground, your guidance with any facet will be very much appreciated.

Rgds,
Stephen Doud

[drepouille]

I use a church-provided G Suite account, and it works well for me. As long as folks have the URL or the phone number for the meeting, they can join.

Gotchas:
- I have never approached 250 participants, so I don't know if a stake conference would blow the limit.
- In theory, folks don't need a Google account to participate, but I have had one non-Google user complain that he could not connect to the meeting. I don't know if he was using an iPad or a Windows PC at the time, so I consider this unverified.
- For large group crowd control, I must admit that Zoom is probably superior, although Google Meet is gaining new features every month, such as the recent addition of "Admit all" who are waiting to join.
- The Google Meet host setting that is supposed to allow anyone to join without being admitted does not seem to work as advertised. About half of the 30 connections to Sacrament meeting must be manually admitted, which is rather annoying.

Let's remember that many visiting authorities assume that you have much more equipment and expertise than you actually do. I often have to rely upon the FM Group to assist with extra microphones and audio mixers.

Beware of the Seventy who wants to connect his iPad to your sound system, projector, and online broadcast.

[stephendoud]

Thank you Dana. I'm more familiar with Zoom, and talked to their sales to learn my options. I am completely unfamiliar with G-Meet, and need to be certain the tech we choose will measure up to our needs. I'll watch for more replies to my post.

[russellhltn]

I was recently notified that our stake presidency will be reformed in 2 weeks, due to illness.

Because a general authority is involved, this most likely means that Church Headquarters will be involved to some degree. Don't think you have to pull this off all by yourself. They should be putting you in contact with one of their engineers from "ICS Broadcast Planning & Event Support". Don't be afraid to ask for help.

The church will have a Zoom license that will allow for what you need to do.

The setup is surprisingly simple. Setup a laptop with Zoom. Connect the projector to the laptop. Connect the chapel "Record Out" jack to the laptop to get audio in, and use a Crab box (preferably a EJ-8) to connect the laptop to the chapel sound system.

To connect the audio to the laptop, use this $8 adapter from Amazon and get a 25' 3.5mm male to 3.5mm male cable.

For the camera, you could use a web cam. I used a Sony Handycam we use for stake conference with a HDMI to USB converter. Zoom saw it as a web cam.

They'd prefer that you run (co-host) the Zoom call, but depending on what all you have on your plate, you could probable get them to do it. If you are going to do it, I'd suggest a second laptop to manage the call. I'm not sure what machine you'd use to create the RTMP stream for the Sunday session. I pushed that off onto SLC as I was shorthanded.

There's a few more details, but essentially, you're just wiring the chapel for a Zoom call and nothing more. At least that's how I was directed to do our stake conference where we reorganized the stake presidency in the first week of November.

[stephendoud]

Thank you Russell

With the short notice, should I call Church Services and ask for ICS support?

You mentioned a church Zoom account. I was going to open one just for the meetings, and add-on the Large Meeting option for 500 connections (5 for chapel comms, rest for at-home members).

[russellhltn]

With the short notice, should I call Church Services and ask for ICS support?

You could. You could also try contacting the secretary of the general authority that's going to be there. Presumably there's been some email correspondence going on between the secretary and the stake president/acting stake president.