Beyond Today Updates

• Beyond Today Program Gathering Momentum
• Beyond Today Listed on Google Video
• Beyond Today Web Site Visitors and Program Response Reported

Beyond Today Program Gathering Momentum

by Peter Eddington

Program scheduled for 124 TV channels and growing.

In early January a "DVD sampler" of the first four Beyond Today video programs was mailed to all pastors. Enclosed was a letter from Clyde Kilough requesting pastors to show some of the programs to their congregations. A second document was also enclosed that outlined how U.S. members can work on getting the program on cable-access TV channels in their own town or city.

On Jan. 11 and 12 four more Beyond Today video programs were recorded in the new media center, with Darris McNeely hosting. This brought our total to 12 programs. To date, 124 local community cable TV channels across the United States are signed up to air the program, plus our presence on the World Wide Web is gaining momentum. See the article on page 2 for more details.

In the United States, if you are interested in hosting the program on your local town's community-access TV station, please contact John LaBissoniere at john_labissoniere@ucg.org or by telephone at (888) 369-9940.

Our multimedia Web site, which hosts these programs, is adding more content each week at www.beyondtoday.tv. You can presently view material from the first eight programs. Be sure to visit and watch the video clips! You can view broadband, high-quality clips, plus download dial-up versions if you have a slower Internet connection. QuickTime files are also available for download to video iPods so that Beyond Today can be viewed away from your computer.

Please continue to pray for the men and women involved in production of our media efforts that God may grant us the ability to effectively reach this world with the good news of His Kingdom.

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Beyond Today Listed on Google Video

United gets in on the ground floor of a new video search feature to promote the Beyond Today program.

by Aaron Booth

The popular online search tool, Google, offers a new video search feature where registered users can upload videos to the Google video Web site. This free service allows visitors to search for posted videos and either view them online or download them.

Currently, we have eight Beyond Today TV programs posted on the Google video Web site. In just a few weeks, these programs have been viewed over 1,500 times. The most popular—"Is There Life After Death?"—has generated over 1,000 views.

Thanks to this new feature from Google, we are able to reach more people online with the Beyond Today TV program than we would just from the beyondtoday.tv Web site.

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Beyond Today Web Site Visitors and Program Response Reported

by Peter Eddington

Overall, the first two months of activity at the Beyond Today Web site, www.beyondtoday.tv, went very well. We had 4,844 visitors to the site in December of 2005, and then a very healthy increase to 13,115 for January of 2006. During January, 132 gigabytes of material was streamed to our visitors. This amount of bandwidth usage is much higher than at either www.ucg.org (35.3 gigabytes) or www.gnmagazine.org (65.8 gigabytes). This is, of course, due to the larger streaming video files found primarily at our Beyond Today Web site.

Beyond Today is scheduled to air on 124 channels at present. However, many of these channels are still working through the transition from airing our previous Tomorrow program and Good News TV program.

One early survey to our sponsors showed that only about half of the stations are actually up and running with our new program. We expect that the transition should be complete by the end of February. For example, two of our biggest markets, Chicago and San Diego, are not yet airing Beyond Today but will very soon.

This has affected our responses somewhat. During our program start-up during the last week of December 2005 we received 63 responses to Beyond Today, and then for January 2006 we received 262. We anticipate that February will continue to show a steady increase once again as more stations come on board with the new program.

So far, overall response to United's new video effort has been very positive. Some helpful suggestions have been received from some of our members, and so we plan to incorporate new ideas and continue to improve the technical quality and, most of all, the content, of Beyond Today.

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