It’s all well and good that we’re putting this stream out there… But if we’re not reaching anyone, it’s kind of a big waste of money and time. How do we go about finding out how many people we’re reaching?

Fortunately, Wowza has a built-in mechanism for reporting the number of active stream connections via an HTTP connection to the streaming server. It does this primarily for load balancing purposes but the data is easily parsed for other things as well.

I currently have a VB Script (the code is horrid, because I suck at VB)  that connects to each of the streaming servers, parses the response into a numerical value, adds them up to get a total stream count. The script runs on a 5-second delay loop, keeps track of the peak, and gives me the following output, where the red area is the origin server, green is the repeaters, and blue is the iPhone streams. Windows streams are gleaned directly from Windows Media Services.

That’s all well and good, but how many actual people are watching? We know there are several people who watch this alone, but others do it in groups or with their family. Initially, when we benchmarked other churches, we were told that a ratio of about 1.8 people per stream was a pretty reliable guess. We went with that for a while, as we gathered our own data.

To gather our data, we created a sign-in/feedback form for our web audience that functions very much like the friendship pad we pass around in our physical worship services. One key question that you find only online is “how many people are worshipping today?” Based on the aggregated data from these forms (we’ve collected nearly 8,000), we found that our ratio was closer to 1.7, so we started using that for the purposes of reporting. We typically see about 40% of our peak stream count send us a feedback form, so the per-stream count is probably a fairly representative sample. Periodically, we’ll see the ratio jump up to 2:1 in special circumstances such as inclement weather at our central campus, and we’ll adjust the numbers for that service accordingly.

I’m sure there’s a better way than my cheesy vb script, but it works for now.