First Presbyterian Church of Columbia sanctuary, where IKBSystems installed the AV and streaming production system.
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First Presbyterian Church
of Columbia

Church Columbia, Tennessee Sanctuary & Streaming Production
Interior of the historic First Presbyterian Church of Columbia sanctuary, with wooden pews, a balcony, and arched stained-glass windows.

First Presbyterian Church of Columbia is a historic congregation in a historic sanctuary. The building has carried Sunday services for generations, and the AV had to do its work without competing with the architecture or asking the congregation to adjust to the equipment in the room.

Front mesh panel of the custom production workstation PC built for the streaming system.
Interior of the custom production workstation PC, showing the graphics card, CPU cooler, and cabling.
Rear of the production workstation PC case with routed cabling and power supply.

Custom PC build for streaming and production workstation.

At first, this sanctuary ran its services from an iPad in the pews, with no fixed place to mix and no path to a clean broadcast feed. IKBSystems built a front-of-house position and brought the console onto a Dante network for dedicated audio mix for streaming. A 4K PTZ camera with high optical zoom frames the pulpit and provides wide shots all set up as presets from the back of the sanctuary. A custom workstation PC runs the broadcast with a repeatable workflow, and fill speakers provide intelligibility and voice lift to the choir. The system now gives Sunday operators a defined place to work, a clear sequence to follow, and a service that reaches both the pews and the people watching from home.

The room is only half the congregation. On any given Sunday, part of this church is watching from home, and a microphone pointed at the sanctuary speakers does not translate to a phone. We built the streaming production around a mix made for that listener and an encoding workflow tied to the platforms the church already publishes to, so the person in the living room receives the service with the same clarity as the person in the third row.

A compact white PTZ camera mounted on the sanctuary balcony fascia.

Historic sanctuaries demand restraint. Cable paths, loudspeaker mounting, camera placement, and equipment finishes were planned to preserve the room's aesthetic character, not redraw it around the technology. Stained glass, wood, and plaster set the visual tone long before any camera or loudspeaker entered the room. Our work had to complement that tone, protect the sanctuary from visual clutter, and give the church the function it needed without making the space feel newly technical.

Front-of-house streaming workstation with production monitors, a control tablet, and a PC showing the sanctuary camera feed.
Touchscreen control surface for the audio mixing system at the front-of-house position, with a monitor showing the sanctuary behind it.

The value of the system shows up in the ordinary rhythm of Sunday morning. A volunteer steps to a real mix position instead of finding a seat with an iPad. The choir has reinforcement where the room had been thin. The stream receives its own audio path, its own camera presets, and a workflow the church can repeat without rebuilding the service each week. Nothing about that asks First Presbyterian to become a production company. It gives the church a steadier way to carry the same worship to the people in the pews and the people at home.

“Our church’s streaming system was handled with a sensible touch. From ensuring that we understood our equipment specification to working with the aesthetics in the sanctuary, developing a workflow with both new and existing equipment, and training our operators, IKBSystems has helped us achieve a system that complements our church and connects our congregation together with meaningful live streams and content.”

Susie Baxter Director of Christian Education; First Presbyterian Church of Columbia, TN Or call us directly — 615 840 6147
More of the sanctuary

Further views from the project.

A white PTZ camera mounted beneath the sanctuary coffered ceiling.

PTZ camera out of the way and centered for optimal shooting

A balcony-mounted PTZ camera against the sanctuary painted beams.

Another view of the balcony PTZ camera

A surface-mount loudspeaker on a column beside the sanctuary pipe organ.

Surface-mount Sonance speakers for fill and voice lift for the choir.

Systems & Equipment

Sanctuary Audio

  • Distributed loudspeaker coverageIntelligibility across every pew
  • Console calibrationTuned to the historic sanctuary acoustics
  • Microphone systemsWireless and wired for pulpit, pastoral, and choir use
  • Recallable mix scenesConsistent board states and audio mixes

Streaming Production

  • PTZ camera coveragePreset framing for pulpit, choir, and wide sanctuary views
  • Dedicated stream audioConsole feed routed over Dante for online streaming audio
  • Publishing workflowBroadcast workflow aligned with the church's streaming platforms

Production Workstation

  • Custom workstation PCSpecified and built-in house for multi-tasking compute, professional video and audio, and stream production
  • Touchscreen camera controlOperator access to presets, manual control, and device status
  • Repeatable service workflowDocumented sequence for Sunday operators
  • Support-ready configurationConfigured for remote monitoring and lifecycle management

Architectural Coordination

  • Discreet equipment placementRespect for the historic sanctuary
  • Cable path coordinationMinimized visible runs
  • Source distributionConsistent routing throughout sanctuary and other spaces

Have a sanctuary that needs to sound like itself?

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Or call us directly at 615 840 6147