(Photo: Our SermonAudio staff photo with special guest, David Murray, at a recent Christmas dinner. We are grateful for another year of progress. We are grateful for this talented team God has assembled.)
2019 is here!
We are entering into our 19th year of operation here at SermonAudio and we want to say a great big THANK YOU to our broadcasters and listeners all around the globe!
We thought 2017 was busy. Pfft! ... 2018 was even busier! Another year of big "underground" development. If you recall, one of the most important things we did as a development team in 2017 was to begin laying the foundation for some much-needed infrastructure overhaul. Well, the big thing for 2018 was finishing it. Again, infrastructure is not something that anyone can see on the surface, but it is vital we get it right before we can build on top of it. And get it right we did!
2018 was also a year where we got involved in helping and encouraging some friends in various parts of the world. Whether it be with a team in Kenya, Northern Ireland, Haiti, or the Dominican Republic, it was a year of doing what we could to "lift up the hands which hang down" and supporting our brethren.
And finally, on a personal note, as the year drew to a close, 2018 was also the year that my father died. I wrote a simple tribute at the time of his sudden passing but a much fuller tribute can be watched around the 26-minute mark of the recorded funeral.
We've compiled a partial list of what, by God's grace, we have been able to accomplish in 2018. Take a look!
Making the Sermon Player Even Greater! - The player has undergone a refresh! It sports some slick new animation when clicking the play button as well as redesigned elements. All embedded players are updated as well.
Fire Tablet Edition - A native app for those using the Amazon Fire Tablet. Enjoy sermons & live webcasts on one of the most popular tablets available!
Partnership with VCY America – We've partnered with popular radio network VCY America to deliver even more Christian programming content conveniently through our primary site and multiple smartphone and television apps.
The Paperback Bible - This is our attempt to make the Bible more personal. Packaged as individual BIBLE BOOKS, spiral-bound in a smaller, portable format with ample margins for notations.
Ultimate Embed Code Editor – The embed editor has been refreshed yet again with an entirely new interface which is much easier to navigate.
Sermon Search. Better. Stronger. Faster. - Searching is now much faster and more relevant than ever. Searching over a million sermons now happens almost instantly and the all-new sort order option of Relevance ranks sermons to bring the most relevant results to the top. It's fast.
Alexa, Open SermonAudio! – We're happy to announce that SermonAudio officially has support for the Amazon Echo family of devices.
SermonAudio Listen Line – Any broadcaster on SermonAudio can now make their live webcast available over a regular telephone — without the Internet, without a computer, without "data" — simply by dialing a phone number. It doesn't get any easier than this.
A Better Sermon Video Player - The sermon video player has been completely rewritten. An extremely fast-loading improved video player built from scratch by our own SA engineers designed specifically for sermons!
Massive Audio Improvements - Incredibly, all of this new development is happening without any additional fees or restrictions. No bandwidth limits. No upload limits. No storage limits. One flat monthly cost.
SA Metal Sign - An attractive and durable little aluminum sign (8" x 4.5") that you can easily attach to the wall of an appropriate area of your church.
Fresh New Shirts, New Look, New Feel! - Brand new t-shirts! NEW design on a higher quality-feel material. Show your love for SA and wear with pride!
10,000 Gospels of John! - We're happy to announce that 10,000 copies of the Gospel of John have been mailed to homes in the Burlington NC.
New Sermon Dashboard! – After many months of painstaking development, we launched our new Sermon Dashboard to manage all sermons in one unified interface. Submit, upload, publish, edit, delete .. it's all here!
Launch of SA COINS! For broadcasters, it's an easy way to earn credits to reduce or even eliminate their monthly bill!
Building on top of a strong foundation.
As we look forward into 2019, there's oh, so much more to come! 2018 was largely about infrastructure completion. But we plan to continue to BUILD ON TOP of that strong foundation and so you'll be seeing a lot more visual changes as a result. You're already starting to see this with our new Sermon Dashboard, but SermonAudio 2.0 is coming and we can't wait to show what we've got planned!
Some tidbits of things-to-come, include:
An automated Publish-Everywhere service.
Entirely new SOLO sites for all broadcasters.
Entirely new native church apps for Android and iOS.
Revamped stats & logging.
Revamped Members Only Area.
More SermonAudio 2.0 development.
Helping missions with our own branded Pearl Mountain Coffee.
Our third Foundations Conference in NYC.
It is easy for us to become overwhelmed when we consider the mountain before us. Recently, I was struck with the simple words of Jesus in Mark 11:22, "Have faith in God." When faced with an impossible mountain, the lesson for us all is to ask God for more faith, more strength, and more of His Spirit to see these mountains cast into the sea. For if we don't doubt in our heart, "but shall believe that those things which he saith shall come to pass; he shall have whatsoever he saith."
