Sons serving overseas with the U.S. military and elderly sisters in Florida have been a few of the people who were able to attend funeral services in Kokomo who otherwise might not have.

It didn’t take a car or a plane to get them here. It took an Internet cable.

Mahogany furniture and floral carpet designs adorn the interior of Shirley & Stout Funeral Home’s Lincoln Road Chapel. But they make up a classical veneer for the business owners say they are trying to focus more on Internet and technology.

Shirley & Stout, Hasler-Stout and Stout & Son funeral homes about six months ago began filming funeral services and feeding the live video online.

The owners say the Internet service allows them to better reach family members who couldn’t attend the funerals in person.

The umbrella of five funeral homes, which has two chapels in Kokomo and in Greentown, Russiaville and Burlington, contracted with Event by Wire.

Co-owner Jeff Stout said he began considering placing funeral services online after a couple of occasions in which the grandchildren of the deceased were stationed in Afghanistan and the military did not grant them leave to attend the funeral.

“Just two weeks ago, we had a funeral for a woman who has a sister in Texas and one in Florida,” Stout said. “One was 89 and the other was 92. There was no way they could travel.”

Instead of missing the funeral, the family members clicked a mouse a couple times and watched the services through their computer screens.

The funeral homes offer the Internet videos as a standard part of their services.

Funeral directors send e-mail invitations to people the families want to invite to view the service. After people respond, they receive an e-mail with a link to the video.

Only invited guests receive passwords as a way to prevent unwanted viewers.

Families can request to not receive the video service, but about 75 percent of them use it, Stout said.

Most of the funerals have had one or two online viewers since the service began, he said.

The funeral home employees tuck the video cameras in as unobtrusive of a corner or niche as they can find, Stout said.

The person behind the lens will do some basic camera work, such as panning and zooming in close on the officiants when they are speaking.

Once the family goes up close for the final viewing, the video cuts out to give them privacy, Stout said.

Co-owner Bill Shirley said the funeral homes have used the equipment to film community events, such as a Christmas midnight Mass service. He said he would be willing to extend filming services to other events as long as the employees had time.

Although the online funeral services may seem detached, the majority of people still want to offer their final farewells in person, Stout said.

“They want to be able to meet and greet people,” he said. “They still want the personalization.”

Funeral homes around the U.S. have increasingly begun putting live feeds to funerals on their websites, said John Reed, the immediate past president of the National Funeral Directors Association.

He estimated about 40 percent of funeral homes in the country webcast services, and that number will grow exponentially in the next few years.

The concept began to evolve about three years ago, he said.

“Families that don’t have the ability to travel, it really gives them the opportunity to take part in the service and be there as though they were sitting there,” Reed said.

There are about a dozen companies in the U.S. like Event by Wire that offer “quality” videos, he said.

The introduction of video is part of a larger emphasis on using technology to advance the business, the owners said. It is an effort to better accommodate a more tech-savvy crowd of clientele.

Kelly Miller, a co-owner of Ellers Mortuary, said although the funeral home, which has two chapels in Kokomo, doesn’t have video on its website, the business has toyed with the idea.

“The reason I haven’t pursued it any more is because I want to be careful,” he said. “If someone doesn’t want to be in the video tapes and put online, how do you cut someone out of it? ... I just feel there could be some risk in doing that. But that’s my own personal thoughts.”

Like most businesses, funeral homes will begin to use the Internet more and more, Reed said.

“How creative is your mind, I guess,” he said. “Webcasting is probably the most recent thing. But now memorial tributes, video tributes have taken hold. Before that, obituaries went online. There were very personalized memorial folders prior to that with pictures and everything.”

Hiring funeral directors with technological and telecommunications skills could also become more prevalent, Reed said.

“In my particular instance,” he said, “I’m in a very rural community. Would that be something I would look for in a new hire? Yes, it would be somewhat. At a large metropolitan firm, it’s definitely a thing.”

• Daniel Human is the Kokomo Tribune business reporter. He can be reached at 765-454-8570 or at daniel.human@kokomotribune.com.