Lutheran Church of Hope Chooses TSL’s Broadcast Control System to Simplify Processes for Volunteer AV Operators

Marlow, UK – 8th November 2017 – Leading broadcast equipment manufacturer, TSL Products, today announced the Lutheran Church of Hope, a megachurch in Des Moines, Iowa, has purchased a TallyMan broadcast control system as part of an overhaul of its AV operations.

The Lutheran Church of Hope caters to the spiritual needs of a large and diverse congregation, which includes 20,000 members across 6 campuses. The Church’s message is delivered through a variety of 21st century means: traditional services with liturgy and hymns, streamed sermons, online webcasts, contemporary services supported by a 10-piece rock band, YouTube videos, and an exhaustive list of programs and services.

Chief Systems Engineer, Jim Sheppard, challenges his team to keep up with the demands required to support these productions. They are in the process of revamping much of the Church’s AV infrastructure to accommodate a transition from SD to HD, as well as the demands of on-demand content infrastructure and streaming.

“We were looking to put in place a system that would allow us to stream to our multiple locations at the push of a button, while keeping the process simple and manageable for all our volunteers who are not necessarily AV experts,” said Sheppard.

Every week multiple sermons are streamed directly to all the satellite campuses from the technical core of the church’s infrastructure, which is located at the West Des Moines broadcast campus.

“In particular, we were looking for a control system that would help us coordinate all our critical components to ensure that our volunteer operators are aware of and can easily instruct all the relevant systems at pertinent times throughout the production,” added Sheppard.

To help with this endeavour, Shepherd chose a TallyMan broadcast control system from TSL products. The new system will be able to interface with a wide range of equipment from different manufacturers that include routers, switchers and multiple audio and video monitors, and multiviewers.  

Sheppard is creating an essential and customizable user interface for each position. The engineering team will be able to automate and simplify complex multi-step operations into simple push button control for their teams of volunteer (non-engineer) operators. This frees up Jim’s team, professional engineers, to focus on technical triage and the task at hand, without worrying about the underpinning systems.

Thanks to TallyMan’s cross-platform capability, it will be able to integrate with the different types of routers that the Church has in the different campuses.

“From the operator’s perspective, it’s the same interface. It makes it look the same even if the back end is different. That’s why we didn’t want to use a proprietary tally system,” added Sheppard.

The fact that the TSL control system is designed to be configured and commissioned by the end user engineer (with a minimal amount of training) creates a great deal of expansion and multi-use potential for systems like this around the globe in the future.

About TallyMan

With more than 1000 systems in use worldwide, TallyMan is recognised as the most reliable solution to real-time, user-oriented control and dynamic data display, providing best-fit control for best-of-breed systems. The core software continues to evolve, incorporating the advanced access capabilities and automated workflow functionality that its users demand. A key part of the TallyMan functionality is the ability to design virtual control panels, usually implemented on touchscreen PCs. The latest release of tools allows operators to create multi-take buttons, which achieve multi-device, precisely time-aligned salvos of commands. The design platform now includes a new range of sliders, rotary encoders and X-Y control, which can be applied to anything from positioning robotic cameras to adjusting audio levels to colour correction.