A colleague mentioned to me today that it was interesting how BYU is expanding its use of media to share uplifting messages of truth, enlightenment, and intelligence. My reply to him was that in general, the Church’s use of media lately has been explosive.
How much does the Church use media? Five years ago, there were few places where one could grab a podcast of something as fundamental as the Standard Works. There were MP3s here and there. One could go to BYU Broadcasting and search for talks and discourses one at a time. But this very day, September 25, 2012, I found no fewer than 90 podcasts relating to the Gospel and members of the Church.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has an entire section of their site dedicated to “Video, Audio, and Images” available to all. They have a wonderful Youtube channel, a number of Facebook pages, a bunch of Twitter accounts, lots of things available on iTunes, and a handful of audiobooks to be posted soon.
As one who loves to collect and listen to audio files of speeches, discourses, devotionals, General Conference addresses, and other such LDS materials, this thrills me. Through the past few years, I have amassed a collection of about 70 Gigabytes of such content. What excites me even more is that it is starting to be produced faster than I can listen to it.
Recently, our household was considering ways to cut expenses. One way was through buying a Roku device. The one-time purchase provided extra content, allowing us to take our Satellite TV plan to the lowest one available. Buying a Roku turned out to be one of the best purchases I have ever made. The reason: The Church has its own channel on the Roku! In addition, there is a lot of highly informative and uplifting material in the BYU Channel.
The Church’s use of media has exploded in the last handful of years. I first became aware of this from an address by M. Russell Ballard at the BYU-Hawaii Commencement on December 15, 2007, called “Sharing the Gospel Using the Internet.” (mp3 here) Since that address was given, all kinds of channels, feeds, podcasts, and other types of resources have been made available to all who wish to have it, most of the time in their own language. A quick visit to the links provided herein will take you to audio, podcasts, or videos on nearly any topic for which you seek more information.