In the worship software hall of fame, a few names have stood the test of time. Among this select group, MediaShout stands as software that has continued to grow for the last 20+ years in functionality and use.
With the creation of MediaShout 7 (MS7), they've added more features to make your job easier as a church techie.
New MediaShout features
According to their website, MediaShout 7 has been rewritten from the ground up, stripping away legacy code that held it back. With complex software like this, it might be tempting for developers to never start over. But that's how problems continue from version to version. It's promising for the future that they've taken this step.
The new version isn't just a rewrite. Actually, it includes valuable features for your church.
7 Smart Ways MediaShout Worship Software Makes The Church Techie's Job Easier
1. Plug-in Architecture
Right now, plug-ins include a sermon builder and cue library plug-in, as well as others, but the architecture will enable the addition of more in the future.
One of the first of these plug-ins was the Scenario plug-in which shipped with MediaShout 7.1. It enables you to set up auto advancing for a cue and then jump to any other cue as well.
2. MediaShout Presenter View
While cues can be triggered from the editor, MediaShout's new Presenter view (which is similar to, but builds upon, v6's Volunteer Mode) makes running MS7 during church easy. Whether you prefer to preview slides as thumbnails (size is adjustable) or as a list, which makes text easier to read (and returns from version 5 and before), you can easily see what slide is up and which is next.
3. Side-by-side Functionality
Speaking of text, lyrics aren't the only thing that MediaShout 7 has improved upon. With pastors sometimes wanting to compare translations or in bilingual congregations, showing two translations at once is now easier than ever before. You can either choose to show them side by side or one on top of the other with ease.
You can also choose non-consecutive verses in Bible cues, so if your pastor wants to skip around, you don't have to choose a larger block and skip part of it or add the cues with multiple steps. For churches that add a lot of scripture, but not always in its entirety, this can be a God-send (no pun intended).
4. Remote Advance
Speaking of scripture and the sermon, some pastors like to use a remote to advance their own slides. This used to be a hassle, but not anymore. Now, once you connect the remote and tell MediaShout about it, it should just work, assuming the receiver stays in the same port.
5. Stage Display
For the pastor or worship teams, stage display has been a gift. Thankfully, MS7 makes it even better by enabling you to customize it fully or letting you just mirror the main screen and change back and forth quickly and easily.
These are some of the big improvements in MS7, but sometimes it's the little things that really add to the versatility of a piece of software.
6. PowerPoint Import Feature
While the sermon builder plug-in makes creating sermons in MediaShout easy, not all pastors will abandon PowerPoint (no matter how much we techies want them to). So now, MS7 can import PowerPoint files as either images or native MediaShout cues that you can edit without opening other software.
7. MediaShout Deactivation Option
It might not seem like a big deal (until it is) but MS7 adds a new license portal that enables you to activate and deactivate computers yourself. This could be really helpful if your machine that dies right before church and you need to activate a new one with very little time.
MediaShout is a pioneer of worship software that keeps improving and offers updated tools for church technology. In a recent review, we share 7 smart ways MediaShout makes church tech easier. Click To TweetThere are also other new features, too numerous to expand upon, but that could be very important for you. These include:
- The ability to toggle your text to all caps
- Adding comments to cues and pages for operators to read
- Cropping images
- Background image effects
- Video background speed control
What Else Separates MediaShout From The Crowd
MediaShout isn't new to the worship software game. They were pioneers. When almost no churches were using computer-based projection, they were already introducing features that PowerPoint took years to add.
They've always been interested in helping churches first and the ease with which you can add public domain hymns and scripture from 70 Bible translations (included with the site license) makes this apparent.
In fact, everything already included in MediaShout 7, carried over from previous versions, makes your job as the person creating or presenting lyrics, sermon notes, and media, easier.
There are a lot of worship presentation software choices and while most get the basics right, some choose to add new features instead of perfecting the basics. MediaShout 7 continues to get this right.
Read more: 4 New Worship Planning Software Options
Cross-platform Support Remains To Be Seen
MediaShout started on Windows, but recent versions worked on the Mac, too. While it may be coming, MediaShout 7, as of the writing of this article, is not available for either Intel-based or Apple Silicon Macs.
It may be that the user-base for MediaShout on Mac is tiny compared to that of the Windows version, but since other worship presentation software is available for both, with nearly-identical (or identical) feature-sets, this is a huge missed opportunity as disgruntled users of the competition who have fairly new presentation computers would be hard-pressed to consider software that's available only in its previous iteration.
Live-streaming Support For MediaShout
With other worship presentation software adding support of live-streaming, in the age of COVID, whether directly inside the software or by making it possible to create alternate formatting of the content for the people online that's shareable directly to other software via NDI or other means, this seems like a miss.
That said, if you want to split the output of MediaShout and send that into a switcher or capture it into a computer for encoding, you could absolutely do that. In fact, MediaShout has partnered with a couple of live-streaming hosts to provide discounts for churches that want to do just that.
Additionally, you could easily capture the output of MS7 using NDI Scan Converter (a free download from NewTek, the creators of NDI) and send that to OBS, Vmix, etc. either on the same computer or another one on the same network.
So, the limitation here is that you can't have alternate formatting (unless maybe you do some out of the box thinking with the stage display feed), like a lower third coming from a single instance of MS7 on a single computer run by a single operator. Nothing would stop you from doing it with a second computer and operator, if you had a site license, though.
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MediaShout Pricing
MediaShout 7 sells for $399 for a single computer and $499 for a site license with upgrade pricing of $249, no matter whether you previously had a single or site license of MediaShout 6.
For churches looking to upgrade their computers, MediaShout offers computer/software bundles starting at $1,599.00 (which include a site license of MediaShout 7).
In conclusion, MediaShout 7 has a lot going for it. It has a strong history and a strong group of loyal users. They've rewritten with the future in mind and have an architecture that is ready for new features.
Is it perfect? No. Would it work for most churches? Definitely…if you don't need to have an alternate output for live-streaming or multiple screens for your congregation.
If you're in the market for worship presentation software, give MediaShout 7 a look and see if it's right for you. It just might be.