Funeral homes offering webcasts of memorial services
Los Angeles Times - 31 July 2011
After Getty Images photographer Chris Hondros was killed covering the Libyan uprising this spring, more than a thousand people crowded into a Brooklyn, N.Y., church for his memorial service.
Another thousand attended — virtually — through a webcast streamed onto their computers.
The $12-billion funeral industry is going high tech. Crematories are being equipped with touch screen controls. Quick response bar codes are being chiseled onto headstones for visitors to decipher using their smartphones.
And funerals are being streamed online for friends and family members anywhere in the world.
Forest Lawn Memorial-Parks & Mortuaries, the funeral home and final resting place for Hollywood celebrities such as Bette Davis and Lucille Ball, first offered webcasting at its Hollywood Hills and Glendale cemeteries in 2008.
It proved so popular that the company expanded the service to its seven other Los Angeles-area locations the last two years, said Scott Drolet, Forest Lawn's senior vice president of operations. "When a loved one passes away," he said, "people either need to jump on a plane or have to miss the funeral entirely."
The company has streamed more than 400 services and is averaging one webcast a day.
Funeral homes usually charge $100 to $400 for a webcast — Forest Lawn prices them at $275 — although some funeral homes are throwing in the service for free to get people comfortable with the idea.
Video cameras are normally associated with festive occasions such as weddings, and Letty Munoz of El Paso thought it was "a little weird and macabre" when a funeral home in Oxnard offered to stream the funeral services of her mother-in-law for family members who could not attend in person.
She ultimately agreed, since none of her three children could get the time off work to attend.
"It was just so strange that they could see us while everything was happening, and it turned out to be a really good thing," she said.
Another advantage of streaming is that the webcast can be preserved on a DVD as part of a family's oral history of members who have died.
"The eulogy is really the summation of a life and what this person meant to those around him," said Dan Grumley, owner of Event by Wire, a software company that creates webcast software for funeral parlors. "It's an archive for future generations that are unborn. It becomes a very rich piece of family history."
"In the next five years, streaming is going to boom because of the baby boomer generation," Reed said. "They grew up in a more open society and are more comfortable with technology like this."
John Reed, Past President, NFDA
No one has a good estimate of how many funeral homes are offering video services. John Reed, a past president of the National Funeral Directors Assn., estimated perhaps 20% of funeral homes are webcasting funerals.
In a few years, however, he expects almost all mortuaries to offer the service — pointing out that tech-savvy baby boomers are at an age at which their parents and other relatives are dying, and are easy converts to the benefits of streaming.
"In the next five years, streaming is going to boom because of the baby boomer generation," Reed said. "They grew up in a more open society and are more comfortable with technology like this."
At his funeral parlors, Reed sometimes handles the camera. He's proud of his work.
"It's almost like sitting there in the chapel," he said. "I even zoom in on the deceased a few times. The sound and picture quality are great."
The software packages produced by Event by Wire, based in Half Moon Bay, Calif., include funeral-specific features, such as online invitations to the streams. The company did business with 80 funeral homes in 2008. This year, it's up to 300 so far, Grumley said.
