CatholicTV's "Your Catholic Broadband Network"

CatholicTV launched a new website today, appropriately dubbed “Your Catholic Broadband Network.” The site is an amazing collection of the video archives of the station along with a live Flash video stream powered by Internap and an array of the best of Catholic blog, podcasts and ‘viewer-generated” video..

In addition, a new monthly schedule will be provided in the station’s free magazine, “The CatholicTV Monthly” with frequent updates and new programmatic additions. Some of those additions are a collection of sixteen Rosaries recorded around the nation. From the Cathedral of the Holy Cross in Boston to the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in Los Angeles to the Basilica of the Sacred Heart at Notre Dame to the glory of a New England autumn, these new HD Rosaries will greatly enhance the prayer life of the CatholicTV audience.

Beginning on the first Sunday of Advent the Mass from the Basilica of the Sacred Heart at the University of Notre Dame will be televised live weekly on CatholicTV at 10 a.m. Sundays (ET) beginning November 30, 2008. The Mass from Notre Dame is also streamed live and archived online at CatholicTV.com.

“We are pleased to partner with CatholicTV to provide the 10:00 a.m. Mass from the Basilica of the Sacred Heart at Notre Dame each Sunday morning. CatholicTV has strong East coast distribution and a strategy for growing its cable audience on a nationwide scale. We are firmly committed to bringing quality Catholic liturgies to a national and global audience,” said Rev. Richard V. Warner, C.S.C., director of Campus Ministry.

Notre Dame broadcasted Mass from the Basilica on the Hallmark Channel from 2002 until June 2008, and also on DIRECTV in 2007. The Basilica staff has received thousands of enthusiastic and appreciative letters and messages from viewers across the country since June requesting that television carriage continue for the Mass. Many viewers are unable to attend Mass at their local parish for physical reasons and others tell of how Notre Dame’s Mass enriches the experience of their local parish liturgy.

The University's Liturgical Choir, under the direction of Dr. Gail Walton, provides music for the 10 a.m. Sunday Mass during the academic year, while the Basilica Community Collegium Choir, under the direction of Dr. Andrew McShane, provides the music for the liturgy when academic year classes are not in session. Special technical effort has been made to capture the voices as they are heard by the congregation in the Basilica. Masses at Notre Dame are marked by the full participation of the assembly in the liturgy. Each Sunday the Basilica is usually filled to capacity for its regularly scheduled liturgies.

The audio and video equipment installed in the Basilica has been designed to be architecturally sensitive to the beauty of the Basilica and to ensure that the broadcasts capture the beauty of the liturgy without disrupting the sanctity of prayer. Technical production of the Mass is provided by Pentavision Communications Inc., which operates the broadcast equipment from a specially designed control room located in the basement of the Basilica. WNDU-TV sends the broadcast via fiber optics to CatholicTV’s master control.

More information on the Basilica of the Sacred Heart is available at http://basilica.nd.edu/, including the ability to download Mass on the Internet, view readings and music texts online, learn about the many Basilica choirs, take a virtual tour of the Basilica, and much more.