At Koinonia House, we’re constantly looking to improve our systems, customer service and access to our resources. Behind the scenes we have many projects on the go and here’s a peek at what’s coming up.
Resource Library Overhaul and Upgrade
As consumer technology advances, we now find that many of our resources that looked great on CRT televisions are not looking that hot on modern HD LCD and 4K televisions. So, we are in the process of re-capturing and remastering most of our content up to HD. While DVDs do not support HD, our Video Downloads and on-demand videos will be upgraded. Anyone who has purchased the video downloads, will be able to re-download the video files in HD once they are completed. We are also transcribing and adding English subtitles to our videos which not only benefit the hearing impaired, but also, the many people who find Chuck sometimes talks a little too quickly. Having subtitles helps.
We’re also:
- Upgrading and recapturing the PowerPoint slides
- Re-editing each teaching to a consistent standard
- Transcribing all of Chuck’s teachings to produce:
- Video subtitles
- Word-searchable database
Word-searchable database
Now you may think a word-searchable database is nothing new by any stretch of the imagination, most websites have search capabilities. But, what if you could do a word or phrase search and be presented with the places where Chuck mentions that word or phrase in any study? Not only the title of the study but also what session and the time-stamp in that session. Then, what if there was a link to open the video, on-demand, and start playing that study from that exact time-stamp? No more wondering, “Now where did Chuck mention ‘Nephilim’ or ‘Rapture’?” for example.
This is one of the new features we will be implementing in the new K-House website.
New khouse.org Website
The K-House website is the main entry point for visitors to our ministry, averaging about fifty thousand visitors per month and long overdue for an upgrade. Although some updates and re-skinning have been carried out over the past few years, we’ve reached a point where we need a complete re-build.
The new website will be more mobile-friendly, a much better-organized articles section, with more frequent activity, better categorizing and linking to related materials and resources. Better social media integration and sharable content.
Personal Update
We’re in our 30th year of publishing the PersonalUDPATE magazine. The current environment is very different from 30 years ago. News used to travel much slower. However, these days–with social media and the Internet–you can hardly avoid up-to-the-hour news bulletins. And if you wait a day or two, it’s old news.
Just as many mainstream publications are moving over to digital-only formats, we too are moving in this direction. Unfortunately, costs associated with printed media continue to rise, and subscriptions for the printed version of the PersonalUDPATE have steadily fallen (now under 500 per month) in favor of our online digital version. The Digital version is accessible globally, whereas, due to expensive postage fees, the printed version is only distributed within the U.S.1
So, another big, upcoming change is moving the PersonalUPDATE from a periodical publication to a section on our new K-House website. Normally, we prepare the PersonalUPDATE weeks in advance as it needs to get to the print-house for printing and distribution. Articles, therefore, needed to be more 'evergreen' and not so much about current events as these events can be 'old news' by the time the PersonalUPDATE is distributed. With the new website, we can publish updates as soon as they become available. The last PersonalUPDATE magazine in print will be in December 2020.
New K-House Store
Back towards the end of 2018, we launched a major update to our store. The new store was rebuilt on a new platform. This allowed for greater up-time, reliability, better security and certainly streamlined things on the administration side for our staff. This also allows us to provide more responsive online support.
We increased the number of digital downloads, so, now most of our products have digital download versions available (Audio, Video, and ebooks). Additionally, we removed any download limits, and downloads are delivered via an accelerated content delivery network. This means faster downloads and no slowdown if a lot of people are simultaneously downloading. Your downloads can be accessed at any time, and with any device, from the download area of your store account.
Here are some other great features of the new store:
- Manage your own profile, addresses, passwords, and Wishlist.
- Free Shipping within the U.S. for orders $40 and over
- A section for Free Stuff! Add to your cart, complete the checkout process, and download right away!
- Easier donation options with instant U.S. Tax receipts (sent via e-mail), and a donation history dashboard in your store account
- Improved Gift Cards
- Improved Smart Search, you no longer have to type in titles exactly, also gives suggestions and recommendations
- Better FAQ section, and online support
- On-Demand Streaming options in-store
- Better Security
- Mobile friendly
66/40
66/40 is our Bible Teaching program featuring Dr Chuck Missler, and is a walkthrough of “66 books penned by 40 authors over thousands of years.”
66/40 has gone through some major changes over the last few years.
In the secular world, broadcasters pay content creators for content to use on their platforms. In the Christian world, however, it’s very common for content creators to have to pay broadcasters. A huge portion of our budget was used to pay radio stations to play our content. As these broadcasting costs increased and more and more people were asking for our content to be made available, we decided to significantly reduce our broadcasting costs, and instead of trying to pay hundreds of stations, we now simply offer our 66/40 program (for free) to any radio station that would like to play it. Many chose to take up the opportunity to host our 66/40 program and we are currently on over 400 stations within the U.S., over 700 in Australia and New Zealand, and more around the world. If you would like your local radio station to add 66/40 to their schedule for free, get them to get in contact with us at radio@khouse.org.
Our 66/40 ‘Play it Again’ website has been long overdue for an upgrade, being plagued with reliability issues, so we will be addressing this over the next few months with a more reliable and user-friendly service.
K-House TV
Our on-demand service (K-House TV) was created back in 2015 as a result of Chuck Missler wanting to stream one of his conferences online. This was a good learning experience for us as some of this was pretty new technology, even for the broadcast/on-demand industry. Surprisingly, the infrastructure behind this was quite expensive. We didn’t have the finances, viewership, or resources available to us like the big streaming companies, but users expected the same level of performance. From that time on, we have looked for ways to make running costs as low as possible while maintaining a good quality service, so we can provide an affordable service to you, the end-user.
Our latest big update happened in January 2020. We closed down the old K-House TV website and placed the on-demand service in our new store. This saves us thousands of dollars per month, allows single login and better security right off-the-bat. Anyone with time left on their on-demand subscriptions had their remaining access time transferred to the new service.
Update 2023
KHouse TV has since launched as a stand-alone service, and apps are also available for iOS, Apple TV, Android and Android TV, Roku and fireTV. Most Topical studies are free to watch, and we have subscription streaming plans (for premium content) at $4.99 per month or $49.99 annually. Visit KHouse TV here.
Notes:
1 Update: The PersonalUDPATE is now digital only.
