Design and implementation of a mobile webcast application with google analytics and cloud messaging functionality

Abstract

Church cast is an application developed to bring the messages of ministries closer to their members by harnessing the Internet and mobile devices. Due to the very busy schedules of people and religious restrictions in some countries, people are not usually able to be physically present at their locations of worship to listen to or watch their ministers. Existing applications developed in the past like DOMI radio and Redemption TV Media were limited to only audio, poor and unintuitive user interfaces and not providing the administrator any interactions with the users of the application. In this work, we develop an Android-based application that makes it possible for users to watch live streams and on-demand videos from their ministries using their mobile devices. The application also incorporates sharing and analytics functionalities to enable users to share videos messages with loved ones and help the administrator monitor users' activities on the application respectively. The cloud messaging functionality enables the administrator to send messages such as announcements to user devices as push notifications. This would eventually increase user knowledge and interaction with the activities going on in their respective places of worship.