Ask not what you can do for Planning Center Online, ask what Planning Center Online can do for you. And in this case, we’ve blown the doors off! We have released a new Media page- on your normal Planning Center site, and then also on our Community Media page. It’s slick, easy, and integrates with Worship House Media. There are three major things that have changed or been added, and below I address each one. 
Incorporation of Media into PCO: If you have videos that you think would be useful for your staff/volunteers to see on PCO, you can now easily upload them. We will even process them for you, create thumbnails, and make them streamable. Editors and Administrators will now see a ‘Media’ tab, along with the Plans, Songs, and People tabs (yes, we are definitely branching out aren’t we?). You will just click on ‘add a media’, enter the information, and then you ca
n just upload it like you would with a song. It will display so nice and pretty as well!
Now, we realize that this is probably going to cause many of you to need more file space (media takes up a lot of space). We are working on putting together some new options to where you could pay for extra GB’s of space. So look for that to come in a mini-update in the future. Also something to note is that the maximum size for a single file has been changed from 150MB to 1GB.
Community Media Page: Recently we added the Community
Songs page, and we are equally excited about adding this Community Media page. You will have direct access to the Worship House Media catalog, where you can browse and add any of their media to your own PCO account’s library. And if you decide you want to use it someday, you can purchase the media then use it how you’d like. This page is slick and nice- and as a side note, we do have plans in the future to add more providers along with Worship House Media. Exciting stuff!
Plan Item Dialog Changing: The Editing Item dialog box looks d
ifferent now, since we needed to make room for any media that may be indicated. Mostly everything is just moved around, but still present. The notes are near the bottom now, and on the right, you can add media to that item or song if you want to. There’s also an option to click on ‘add a media’ under the drop-down option for add an item.
If your item has a song attached, it will still be blue in your service flow, even if it has media attached as well. If, however, your item has media attached (and no song), it will be green so that you can easily differentiate between regular items (black), songs (blue) and media (green). Only dramas, countdowns, song videos & regular videos will make the item a media item; background videos & images don’t make an item a media item unless the title of the item is the same as the title of your media.
Miscellaneous: We’ve redesigned the expanded plan item view which previously showed item notes and attachments, and now includes a section for media thumbnails and adds any media attachments to the bottom of the attachments list. In addition, we’ve added video capabilities to the mp3 player.
Tutorial Video: To help you get acquainted with the new features we have also published a new tutorial video which I want thank Aaron for staying up until 4:30am last night doing this. He went above and beyond the call of duty.
Conference Season is here!
We have already been to Catalyst West Coast & the Willow Creek Arts Conference and had a great time!! It is awesome to meet you guys and hear your excitement & ideas for Planning Center Online. We have a few more conferences this year and we hope to see more of you. Next week we are at the Saddleback Worship Arts Conference and then the National Worship Leader Conference & Echo Church Media Conference in July. If you go to any of these conferences please stop by our booth and visit us!
Stephen Wang said
Love the ability, great way to share video lesson and communicate with volunteers. Looking forward to maximizing it’s usage.
Marilynn said
Shift Worship is a site we recently signed up for a few months ago for motion backgrounds and stills. They have an extensive collection(although tags need work). Just a suggestion.
max butler said
Is there any possibility of an PCO Iphone app that you could manage your sets and people offline and then sync with PCO
West Breedlove said
Love using the Center!
A couple of requests:
Can you include time signatures in the song description? Having the B.P.M. and song speed seems kind of superfluous, especially without a time signature choice. Thanks!!
Also, when you press the pencil icon to add a song, but find out you don’t have that particular song, so you create it – is there a way for PCO to make that song you just created show up in the slot you pressed the pencil icon in? It always ends up at the bottom of the outline.
Thanks again! Wonderful job!
Kris said
Is there a way to attach something to an item? We did a special this past weekend and didn’t want it going into our song database. We also want to put scripts up that will only happen once, so add it as an item. I know you can do attachments to plans, which we did for this case, but it would be nice to be able to do it to each item. Does anyone know if this fixes that?
katiewillard said
Thanks for the posts everyone!
@Max- at this time I don’t believe a possibility like this is in our near future. But thanks for the suggestion and feedback!
@West- At the time, there isn’t a way to add a time signature. As far as adding a song how you were talking about, we can look into changing this.
@Kris- At this time with this release, you can add a media to an item, but besides that there is not a way to attach something else to the item. Sorry about that!
katiewillard said
@Kris- oops, I misread. You can add an attachment to an item- as long as it is not a song item or media item. Click the little blue arrow (once you’ve added the item) to expand, then click ‘upload an attachment’. Sorry for my mistake!
J.J. said
Can you link to the tutorial video in the blog? That would be appreciated! Great update! When will you be allowing more space on your servers for us to add more content. because it should be filling up quick as soon as we add our own media.
ministrycentered said
@jj Opps, thanks for pointing that out. I have linked it up. We don’t have a specific time line on buying more space but it will definitely be with-in the next month.
Mari Olsen said
What about West’s other question, about new songs ending up at the bottom of the service? I second that request.
Jay H said
you said i could “upload media” by clicking add media… i find the ‘add media’ button, but it pulls up the browser to browse existing media… i don’t get a dialog to upload my own?
Michael Anderson said
Once again you’ve done it! You have taken a really wonderful worship tool and improved it–AGAIN! Thanks so much for staying dynamic with constant changes and improvements to work with the everchanging worship technologies. Planning Center Online is “one of the sharpest tools in my shed!”
God bless!
kim said
love these new features! thank you so much for your continued imagination!
I do have a question. The green ‘plus’ icon that appears between items used to lead to a dialog box where we could select ‘item’ ‘header’ or ’song’ to insert in that exact place. Now it seems this same icon leads to a dialog box for an ‘item’ that can be changed into a ‘header’ but can’t be a song. Inserting songs this way was one of my favorite features…. any chance this capability can come back?
Aaron said
Is there a way to restore the buttons at the top of the new “add item” dialog box? I thought the old interface was much more user friendly than the new set-up. Perhaps just add the “media” button?
Aaron said
If I could add one more comment, the new Header option doesn’t allow me to covert it to anything else like it did before. Again, another vote from me to marriage the new with the old design.
Thanks for all you do!
Aaron Stewart said
@Jay You can upload media to the media database. Make sure you have clicked the Media tab at the top, then click add media, and then click upload an attachment at the left. You might be trying to upload media directly from a plan, which you can’t do. The media tutorial shows you how to do this.
Aaron Stewart said
@kim This feature is there, but it’s a little different. With the new Planning Center update, you basically only have headers and items, because any item can have a song attached, or multiple media. If there is a song attached, the item is a “song” item. So when you click the green button between items in the plan to add a song to a specific place, you can still make it a “song” item, by just clicking “change” in the Linked Song selection on the right of the Edit Item box and choosing your song.
@Aaron We will see if we can re-add the ability to change a header into an item, thanks for the suggestion.
Rebecca Hawkins said
Wow, You guys just keep thinking ahead of the game. Love it! Thanks so much…