Gateway Church Streamlines Asset Management with CatDV

Based in the Dallas/Fort Worth area of Texas, Gateway Church has a vision to see people saved, healed, set free, discipled, equipped, empowered, and serving. That vision is tightly integrated into its weekend services. The church holds up to five services in a weekend per location. They originate from the main Southlake, Texas, location and are broadcast to other campuses.

But the church’s vision extends beyond what happens each Saturday and Sunday. “We believe church is about more than just a weekend service, especially in a church of our size,” explains Matt Wilson, director of IT user experience, and JD Spivey, creative director of post-production, in a jointly composed article. “It’s about meeting people where they are and giving them opportunities to connect with the church in their own communities. To that end, we’re also a church of small groups.”

Hundreds of those small groups meet in communities throughout the Dallas/Fort Worth area. In addition, the church holds classes, cultural events, and multiday, multi-speaker conferences.

All of that activity generates a lot of content. For example, there are 63 different ministries, each with its own content to record. “All told, we’ve added several terabytes of content to storage every month for 15 years,” says Wilson. “That translates to about 300–400 terabytes of storage for our weekend sermons alone!”

Managing a Large and Growing Asset Library with CatDV
To manage that enormous volume of video content, the church adopted CatDV. “We’ve been using the CatDV asset management system for several years now, and its rock-solid performance and rapid response time have proven invaluable in handling a library as large as ours,” says Spivey.

CatDV lives on top of the IT and post-production team’s existing file system. As a result, the team can import files without having to change the folder structure. “Given the amount of time we had spent organizing our files, it was a huge relief to know we wouldn’t have to change anything,” says Spivey.

Simplifying Content Retrieval with an Intuitive Interface
The Gateway Church team finds CatDV intuitive to use, even for people without in-depth technical expertise. “Now, because of the user-friendly interface, volunteers can easily find content for us, which frees our technical staff to do what they were hired to do,” says Wilson.

When a request for an older asset comes in, volunteers or the technical team can find it fast. “If a pastor asks us to recall a specific sermon from six years ago, we can find it—and everything else related to that topic if necessary,” says Wilson.

Streamlining Post-Production Workflows
CatDV has helped the church simplify multi-faceted post-production workflows. Beyond capturing live productions, the post-production team repackages content for multiple uses—from creating lessons to producing ads. With CatDV, the team can find and reuse the required assets rapidly.

Expanding the use of CatDV for Additional Assets
Given speed and simplicity of accessing assets that CatDV offers, it’s not surprising that the church’s IT and post-production team have begun to use it to manage more content, beyond the archive of sermons. “When all of the assets are ingested, CatDV will manage nearly one petabyte of content—and counting,” explains Wilson. “That means we’ll have Gateway’s entire video history at our fingertips, making it easy to access and use any clip, whether we need it the next day or years down the road.”