LifeWay Downloads: Influencing Like Jesus

The video teaching series for Mike Zigarelli’s Influencing Like Jesus is now available for download on LifeWay.com. 

This is pretty exciting for me because it’s the first video project that I’ve seen all the way through.  This has been the pilot project for my job and everything that’s to come for me, video wise.  With this project I was able to gather the information needed to make my workflow, get authorization for the correct software needs, and fully understand the process of getting the files up to our file server and connected with our online catalog.

The more exciting part about this series is it’s a first for LifeWay in two ways:

(1) This is our first DRM-free video download product.  This is an experiment for us to see how our customers will react to the files not being DRM’d.  There’s quite a bit of risk for us here, as there isn’t a DVD companion piece to this.  In the long run, I think this will serve as a great customer convience.  From my customer service background I know the troubles that a lot of our customers have had with the current DRM set-up.  Plus, this will allow our Mac users to download the files.  I truly think this is a win-win situation, and I hope to get approval on more DRM-free content in the future.

(2) This is our first multi-tiered quality product.  What I mean by that is the videos are available in three flavors:

• Audio Only
• Individual Use / Low Resolution
• Small Group Use / Standard Definition

 This is the first time we’re offering a standard definition downloadable product.  All of our past downloads, such as the Beth Moore Daniel files, were low-res, 360×240 files.  We still have that size available for Influencing Like Jesus, but now we also have the full res, 720×480 files available.  For ‘Influencing’ the files were encoded at an average bit rate of 3000kbps.  Amazon Unbox – a leader in digital downloads – offers their files at an average bit rate of 2500kbps.  I’m proud to say we’re able to beat them at that.

Of course, with that bump in resolution and bit rate we see a much high file size… so these files are definately only for customers that have a broadband connection.

A few links if you’re interested in the product:

• I previously talked with Chris Johnson (the editor of the entire product line) here.
• You can view the free introductory session here.
• You can read about the entire study here.