More People Replacing Cable TV With Internet Set-Top Boxes, Using These Devices to Attend Church in People's Homes

Thousands now participating in live worship services via Roku and other devices.

2010-11-23

LONGWOOD, FL, November 23, 2010 (Press-News.org) Even as USA Today reports that more Americans are cutting out cable and satellite and replacing these services with set-top devices that stream TV shows and movies from the Web, many of us are now using these devices to attend church in people's homes.

Case in point: More than 4,000 owners of the Roku player have installed a new channel from Northland, A Church Distributed (www.northlandchurch.net/roku) that streams live worship services, along with past sermons, music and classes.

A pioneering church that has brought live worship to mobile devices including the iPhone and to Facebook's 500 million users, Northland launched the first-ever church channel on Roku this October. Northland recently helped LifeChurch.TV launch a similar channel on Roku and wants to help many more churches do the same.

Originally designed to stream Netflix directly to TVs, Roku has since opened up to developers to create new music and video channels including Amazon On-Demand, Pandora and Major League Baseball.

Starting at $59, and about the size of a paperback novel, Roku is one of the most compact and least expensive ways to bring the church into just about any room. Installation is simple: Just connect the box to your existing Internet connection using ethernet or WI-FI, and plug an HDMI cable from the back of the unit into the TV.

"Our hope is that people will use this tool to gather together as the Bible challenges us to do in Hebrews 10:25," explains Marty Taylor, Northland's executive director of media design and technology.

The device is a potential boon for the burgeoning house church movement. According to noted researcher George Barna, one-third of American adults claim to have "experienced God or expressed (their) faith in God in a house church or simple church meeting in the past month."

Ron and Marcy Burth started a house church this summer at their home in Venice, Fla., which is now attended by 20 people. Marcy raves, "The Roku box is fantastic. It has really simplified our connection to Northland."

Jeremy Langston is an online congregant from Benton, La., who has worshiped with Northland along with his wife and five children for about a year now. A paramedic on an offshore oil platform, Langston worships via Northland's Facebook app when he's working in the Gulf.

"When I am home, I enjoy the Roku's large, high-quality picture instead of a tiny computer screen, and the sound is much better," he says.

Hulu, the popular online TV and movie site, just made its subscription service available in the Roku Channel Store. Additions such as this will almost certainly have more people buying the device during the holidays, which means more people potentially finding Northland's channel.

Langston concludes, "It may help win many people to Christ who were not even looking for Him."

INTERVIEW REQUESTS
Robert Andrescik,
Director of Public Relations
press@northlandchurch.net
407-949-7147

Northland, A Church Distributed (www.northlandchurch.net) is a pioneering congregation focused on building an international community of worshipers. Led by senior pastor Dr. Joel C. Hunter, the church connects thousands of believers worldwide, bringing live, interactive streaming of its weekly services to the Web, Facebook, iPhone and Android mobile devices, Roku and other environments. Northland has several sites throughout Central Florida, as well many house churches and partner ministries around the globe.

ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:

'12 Days of Whataburger' Celebrates the Holidays with Giving

2010-11-23

Fanatical customers of family-owned Whataburger will celebrate the holidays this year with some spare change thanks to the '12 Days of Whataburger.' As part of the company's 'Whataburger Serves' initiative, the month-long Internet coupon campaign offers customers the opportunity to receive up to 12 free food items throughout December. The coupons include offers for free menu items such as fries, drinks, fried pies and even the company's famous breakfast taquitos. Customers can sign up to receive the coupons via e-mail at www.whataburger.com. After signing up, customers ...

Coupon Site JustAddCoupons.com Enables U.S. Consumers to Earn Discounts on Holiday Spending

2010-11-23

Research is showing that although people are more willing to spend money this holiday season they are still cost-conscious and are definitely looking for more 'bang for their buck'. Many U.S. families still want discount buys for their purchases and JustAddCoupons.com can help consumers achieve this by using coupons and free shipping deals for their holiday shopping. "Many shoppers are aware they can save up to 75% more by shopping online with coupons, but they don't have the time to hunt through countless websites in search of those exclusive savings codes," says Anita ...

2000Charge Introduces Agent2K Program

2010-11-23

Alternative Payment Solutions provider 2000Charge introduces its Agent2K program, the industry's first and only Alternative Payments agent program. The program was designed with one simple objective: provide Agents with a new opportunity to make more money by selling Alternative Payment Solutions. Alternative Payment Solutions are easy to sell, because they are a natural addition to existing credit card solutions and facilitate the acceptance of payments globally. Merchants need more than just credit card processing to maximize their profit; they need to reach out to ...

Rare disease reveals new path for creating stem cells

2010-11-22

BOSTON, Mass. (November 21, 2010)—As debilitating as disease can be, sometimes it acts as a teacher. Researchers at Harvard Medical School and the Harvard School of Dental Medicine have found that by mimicking a rare genetic disorder in a dish, they can rewind the internal clock of a mature cell and drive it back into an adult stem-cell stage. This new "stem cell" can then branch out into a variety of differentiated cell types, both in culture and in animal models. "This certainly has implications for personalized medicine, especially in the area of tissue engineering," ...

Stanford researchers first to turn normal cells into 3-D cancers in tissue culture dishes

2010-11-22

STANFORD, Calif. — Researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have successfully transformed normal human tissue into three-dimensional cancers in a tissue culture dish for the first time. Watching how the cells behave as they divide and invade surrounding tissue will help physicians better understand how human cancers act in the body. The new technique also provides a way to quickly and cheaply test anti-cancer drugs without requiring laboratory animals. "Studies of this type, which used to take months in animal models, can now occur on a time scale of ...

Should airplanes look like birds?

2010-11-22

WASHINGTON, D.C., November 21, 2010 -- Airplanes do not look much like birds -- unless you were to imagine a really weird bird or a very strange plane -- but should they? This question is exactly what a pair of engineers in California and South Africa inadvertently answered recently when they set about re-thinking the ubiquitous tube-and-wings aircraft architecture from scratch in order to make airplanes more fuel efficient. The modern airplane design works well, but from a fuel efficiency standpoint, could planes be designed more aerodynamically -- to lower drag and ...

Simple rubber device mimics complex bird songs

2010-11-22

WASHINGTON, D.C., November 21, 2010 -- For centuries, hunters have imitated their avian prey by whistling through their fingers or by carving wooden bird calls. Now a team of physicists at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has reproduced many of the characteristics of real bird song with a simple physical model made of a rubber tube. "We wanted to know if you [could] build a simple device, which has minimal control but reproduces some non-trivial aspects of bird song," says L Mahadevan, a professor at Harvard. The work is being presented today at the American ...

How hummingbirds fight the wind

2010-11-22

WASHINGTON, D.C., November 21, 2010 -- Hummingbirds rank among the world's largest and most accomplished hovering animals, but how do they manage it in gusty winds? A team of researchers at New Mexico State University, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Technische Universiteit Eindhoven, and Continuum Dynamics Inc. has built a robotic hummingbird wing to discover the answer, which they describe today at the American Physical Society Division of Fluid Dynamics (DFD) meeting in Long Beach, CA Hummingbirds do not fly like other birds, whose wings flap up and down, explained ...

Jump rope aerodynamics

2010-11-22

WASHINGTON, D.C., November 21, 2010 -- Jump ropes are used by kids for fun and by athletes for training. But what about the underlying physics? How do jump ropes work? Can important engineering principles be studied? Jeff Aristoff and Howard Stone of Princeton University have built themselves a robotic jump rope device that controls all the rope parameters -- rope rotation rate, rope density, diameter, length, and the distance between "hands." They capture the motion of the ropes by high-speed cameras, one to the side and one at the end. Then they compare the observed ...

Jet engine too hot? Schedule an MRI!

2010-11-22

WASHINGTON, D.C., November 21, 2010 -- Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), a medical imaging technology used to image organs and soft tissues, may hold the key to improving the efficiency of jet engines, according to Lt. Colonel Michael Benson, a Ph.D. student in Mechanical Engineering at Stanford University. In only a few hours, an MRI collects as much three-dimensional data on flow and mixing as conventional methods that take two or more years of intensive measurement. This promises to slash the time needed to develop and test new designs that improve efficiency and ...

More People Replacing Cable TV With Internet Set-Top Boxes, Using These Devices to Attend Church in People's Homes

ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:

LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES: