OneRoom Redefines Funeral Streaming with Major Platform Upgrade

OneRoom launches a next-generation streaming experience, giving families a keepsake they will return to, and funeral homes a service they can charge for with confidence.

Houston, TX – December 2, 2025 – OneRoom has released a major upgrade to its funeral streaming platform, built around how people actually watch, revisit, and engage with online services today.
These features work together to deliver a more modern and impactful way to experience a service online:

• Chapters split the service into sections that follow the order of service, making it easy to jump to parts like tributes, readings, or reflections
• Key Moments provide short highlights from the most emotional or memorable parts of the service, making them easy to revisit
• Captions and Spanish translation for accessibility and silent viewing
• Subscription platform allows families and guests to self-manage access to the recording at any time in the future, retaining the full interactive experience

Together, these upgrades build on a trusted foundation and take the streaming experience to the next level.

“Streaming has earned its place as a core part of the funeral experience,” said Brady Cox, CEO of OneRoom. “This release gives homes a professional, polished service they can stand behind, and families a way to return to the people, words, and memories that meant the most.”

Give guests what they actually want

Guests rarely rewatch a full service, but they often come back for the moments that stayed with them. This update makes that simple. The new viewer turns a long video into a clear, navigable experience that’s easier to connect with, and easier to offer proudly.

“It’s not just about remote access,” said Justin Whatley, CRO. “You are selling families an experience that they will value the next day and in the future. This release unlocks that value, both emotionally and commercially.”

A new revenue stream, built in

When guests choose to extend their access, funeral homes receive a share of that revenue – no admin, no follow-up. It’s a hands-free way to continue serving and earning.

Built on trust. Leading what’s next.

This release marks a new benchmark in funeral streaming, bringing together navigation, accessibility, and revenue features that no other funeral streaming platform offers. It reflects how people now watch and engage with video, and positions funeral homes to deliver an experience that families will return to and value long after the service ends.

To see the new experience in action, watch the demo here.

About OneRoom

OneRoom is a hands-free funeral streaming platform trusted by funeral homes across North America. With zero-effort setup, automated scheduling and full guest support, it removes the burden of streaming from staff, while giving families a lasting keepsake they can return to and share.

Kirk & Nice Funeral Home Modernized in Major Renovation

New space design rooted in hospitality and healing while remaining true to its history

Plymouth Meeting, Penn. – Last week, Kirk & Nice Funeral Home in Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania, the nation’s oldest continually operating funeral home, unveiled a major renovation and with it, a new approach toward deathcare for Everstory. 

With serene interiors, natural light and spaces for reflection and renewal, Kirk & Nice Funeral Home now offers families a place that honors life, supports grief and encourages new beginnings.

“Understanding the grief our families are experiencing, we wanted to create an atmosphere where they can feel relaxed and focus on celebrating the life of their loved one,” said Matt Sobon, senior vice president of operations, Everstory Partners. “Our new design allows families to gather in multipurpose rooms, experience nature both indoors and out, and embrace services that feel uniquely personal to them.”  

After studying approaches to deathcare worldwide, Everstory Partners, the parent company of Memorial Planning, is committed to transforming funeral homes from impersonal, generic settings into warm, welcoming environments that feel both timeless and modern. 

Highlights of the renovation include:

• A renewed entryway blending the comforts of home with natural elements for warmth and welcome. 
• Outdoor gathering areas that foster quiet reflection, connection with nature, and spaces for conversation or meditation. 
• A multifunctional community-inspired room for services, receptions, and personal celebrations of life. 
• Technology integration throughout, offering intuitive tools for planning, personalization, and ceremony viewing. 

Founded in 1761, Kirk & Nice holds a unique place in American history, and its renovation carefully preserves original features – from stained-glass to centuries-old antiques – while creating a forward-looking environment that serves today’s families. 

“The significance of Kirk & Nice to the history of this industry and to this region is undeniable,” says Michaele Johnson, manager, Kirk & Nice Funeral Home. “For more than 250 years, we’ve been honored to serve this community.  With these renovations, we’re ensuring that families will continue to find comfort and healing here for centuries to come.”

This October, Everstory Partners will also unveil the opening of the first cremation-only building in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia Catholic Cemeteries at Saints Peter and Paul Cemetery in Springfield, Pennsylvania.  Together, these milestones show how Everstory is shaping its funeral and memorial services for modern families – respectful of tradition but inspired by innovation and renewal. 

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About Memorial Planning

Memorial Planning, the parent brand of Kirk & Nice Funeral Home, is a family-focused network of cemeteries and funeral homes, offering personalized end-of-life services. With over 450 locations, Memorial Planning providers proudly serve over 66,000 families a year. 

Visit memorialplanning.com to learn more and for a list of locations.   

About Everstory Partners

Everstory Partners’ mission is to create supportive spaces where individuals and families can find solace, meaning, and hope in the midst of loss. Since 1999, the company has grown to include 463 cemetery, funeral, and crematory locations serving more than 65,000 families a year across the United States (including Puerto Rico) on both a pre-need and at-need basis. Everstory is the brand promise, created in April 2023, to destigmatize death care with a unique blend of long-standing traditions of caring for the deceased with a fresh perspective that death is a natural and beautiful part of the human experience that should be planned and celebrated. 

Visit  everstorypartners.com to learn more and memorialplanning.com for a list of properties and contact information.

The end of trading on Monday marked the end of the first-half of the year for stocks.  And, it was a significant day as on Monday the Nasdaq and S&P 500 both recorded All-Time highs in their numbers.  However, as you may know, the road to the record in 2025 was not a straight climb without a little descent put into the numbers on the way to the records.

In 2025, stocks moved very high into February and then receded. . . and further receded after President Trump announced his “Liberation Day” of tariffs on foreign country products coming into the United States.  As that issue worked its way through the markets and other contemporary issues such as inflation, debt, interest rates, and the potential tax bill moved forward the markets took a turn for the better culminating with those record highs on Monday.

At the end of the day following that roller-coaster ride of six months the major indexes settled up for the period as such. . . S&P 500 up 5.10%, Nasdaq up 4.98%, and the Dow Jones Industrials up 3.36%.

Funeral Director Daily’s Death Care Index (DCI) which consists of the the American public companies bringing in a large share of their revenue from Death Care industry sales also rose for the half-year.  However, the DCI lagged the three major indexes with an absolute increase of 0.95% which, when rounded like the other indexes comes in a a 1.0% increase.

The DCI is comprised of four stocks — Matthews International, Service Corporation International, Carriage Services, and Security National Financial Corporation.  One share of each of those stocks was worth a combined total of $159.38 on January 1, 2025, and those same shares climbed to a value of $160.90 as of the close of business on June 30, 2025.

As you can see, Carriage Services was the half-year gains leader among DCI stocks with a 14.78% return.

Disclosure —  The author of this article for Funeral Director Daily is a shareholder of Service Corporation International, Carriage Services, and Security National Financial Corporation.

Funeral Director Daily take:  It’s certainly been an interesting six months, not only watching the markets, but watching the world.  I’m guessing that a new president in the Oval Office and how he operates has something to do with the “ups and downs” of today’s market.

As for Death Care specifically, the lack of value movement to the upside or the downside does not surprise me.  I think that there is a lot of anxiety and caution about the direction of Death Care business.  Certainly, direct cremation, do-it-yourself memorial services, and other changes have investors wondering how those decisions will affect traditional funeral homes and cemeteries.  And, on the positive side, I think some investors are expecting technological advances to begin to show financial improvements in Death Care businesses.  I expect as these changes move out into reality and are quantified, public investment in Death Care will eventually move one way or another.

As for the overall market, I don’t remember a time when there seemed to be so many “balls in the air” on the front burner that have some financial or political ramifications to them that can affect the market.  We have inflation, interest rates, debt and deficits, tariffs, tax bills, world peace initiatives, and more that will affect how we do business moving forward  —  and the stock market will be a reflection of how that politics and business, including Death Care, moves forward.

Here’s some articles on the subjects for your 4th of July lakeside reading:

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“A servant’s attitude guided by Christ leads to a significant life”

Just watched The Burial, a new movie streaming on Amazon Prime about the multi billion-dollar “death industry” that is both disturbing and “boisterously entertaining,” thanks to two great Oscar-winning actors, Tommy Lee Jones and Jamie Foxx.

It’s about a handshake contract deal gone bad between Jeremiah O’Keefe (Jones), a Mississippi funeral-home proprietor with eight locations, and Ray Loewen, who headed a multinational funeral-home empire based in Burnaby, a suburb of Vancouver, Canada.

O’Keefe is in financial trouble when he decides to sell off his funeral homes to Loewen.The handshake deal takes place on Loewen’s yacht (filming took place circling Vancouver’s scenic inner harbour off English Bay).

Months go by and the deal doesn’t go through. O’Keefe believed the Loewen Group was stalling until O’Keefe went bankrupt so they could buy up O’Keefe’s funeral homes and his profitable funeral insurance business at bargain basement prices.

O’Keefe hires a young Black lawyer to sue Loewen for breach of contract. The young lawyer, Hal (played by Mamoudou Athie) convinces O’Keefe he needs to hire a super successful rich Black lawyer named Willie E. Gary (played by Jamie Foxx) to win the case.

At the time, Gary had never lost a case and had won 90 multi million-dollar lawsuits. The son of a sharecropper, Gary had a private jet named Wings of Justice and wore $5,000 suits. He was one of the richest lawyers in the U.S. Foxx plays him as Johnnie Cochran. Gary was a personal injury lawyer who had never taken on a contract law case. One of Gary’s partners described O’Keefe’s case as “a nap waiting to happen.”

At one point, Loewen had offered O’Keefe $100 million to settle the lawsuit. O’Keefe, believing his lawyer’s advice, decided to proceed to trial.

During the litigation research, O’Keefe learns that the Loewen Group has made an exclusive deal with local Black Baptist churches to sell funeral insurance to parishioners, which Loewen estimated would bring in millions of dollars but would violate the original Loewen contract with O’Keefe.

The Burial also focuses on the bond created between the morose O’Keefe and the flamboyant Gary, with the film’s finale being a courtroom drama that ends with the testimony of Loewen himself.

Gary’s final line of questioning was about Loewen’ about Loewen’s yacht – the one where O’Keefe had reached a deal with Loewen in Vancouver’s harbour. The final question led to Loewen’s undoing on the witness stand, according to the film.

At the conclusion of the civil trial, a mostly black jury awarded O’Keefe $500 million for breach of contract, including $400 million in punitive damages; the amount was later reduced to $175 million.

The massive judgment led to the fall of the Loewen Group, which filed for bankruptcy protection in 1999. By 2002, it was restructured as the Alderwoods Group. Four years later, Alderwoods sold to Service Corporation International (SCI), the $4-billion-a-year American funeral giant based in Houston, Texas. SCI operates local funeral homes under its brand Dignity Memorial.

Ray Loewen had moved to Vancouver in 1969 from Manitoba, where his family ran a small funeral home. In 1975, Loewen successfully ran for the Social Credit party in the B.C. provincial election, but he never made it into cabinet and left politics after three years. He represented Burnaby-Edmonds until 1979.

After his short political stint, Loewen founded the Loewen Group in 1985 and started buying up funeral homes. By 1986, it operated 45 funeral homes across Canada. At it peak in the 1990s – at the time of O’Keefe’s lawsuit – the company had 15,000 employees and operated more than 1,100 funeral homes and 500 cemeteries in Canada, the U.S. and the United Kingdom. It was the second-largest funeral home operator in North America.

After losing the Mississippi trial, Loewen took his company on more expansion, but it didn’t pay off and he was forced out of his own company, according to an article by John Mackie of The Vancouver Sun.

“Loewen vanished from the public eye after he resigned from the company in 1998,” Mackie wrote. “The last time he was in the news was in 2008, when he put his palatial 14,611-square-foot mansion in Burnaby up for sale for $25 million. It wound up selling for $9.948 million in 2012.

“Loewen’s family went into the funeral business in the 1930s in his native Steinbach, Manitoba,” noted Mackie, who is originally from Winnipeg. “Ray Loewen could be a tough businessman. According to a 1996 New York Times story, he liked to tell investors that his first management decision was to fire his brothers from their parents’ small Mennonite funeral home in Manitoba.”

Mackie described The Burial as “a David and Goliath story, with Loewen as Goliath.”

The movie was based on a 1999 New Yorker article by Jonathan Harr and was directed by Maggie Betts from a script she co-wrote with Pulitzer Prize winner Doug Wright.

David Erlich of IndieWire called the movie a “rousing crowdpleaser, which absolutely slayed the 2,000-person audience at its TIFF premiere” in his review.

Foxx and Tommy Lee Jones deliver bravura performances, says this New York Times review. which called it a “next wave” film.

The film spent one week in movie theaters before airing on the Prime Video streaming platform on October 13, 2023.