GREENSBORO, N.C. — YouTube will be Lily Reppert's something new as she and her soon to be husband swap wedding bells for notification bells.
There will be eight other people with them when she and James Woodward get married Friday but hundreds--even a thousand--could be watching from home.
"What's nice is because of this we've been able to invite virtually more people than we originally intended," said Woodward.
The couple first realized they would have to make some major adjustments to their guest list of 160 back in March when Woodward was sent home from seminary in Kentucky.
"It went first with out of town people and then it was like, oh I guess these people can't come either," said Reppert who is a nursing student at Winston-Salem State University, "Now we need to have a list of 30 people. Then it went down to 20 and then to 10. It was super weird."
They decided they wanted to stream online for family and friends who couldn't come. They felt Facebook and other social media would be hard for older relatives to navigate so they decided on YouTube.
There's a catch though--YouTube requires 1,000 subscribers for their account to stream. Two days out, the couple is more than halfway to their goal and climbing.
"We have people like every day, of course now it's down to like two days but we're hoping that maybe there'll be a last flood that gets us to the thousand," said Woodward.
They met in 2018 at a game night and started messaging through Instagram. As a long-distance couple, they relied on texting, phone calls and FaceTime dates. They say it feels fitting that their wedding would rely on the internet.
Friends and family who can't be at the ceremony will drive by the church to wish the bride and groom well after the wedding.
Woodward and Reppert will stream the ceremony on Facebook Live if they are not able to get enough subscribers by Friday but they are optimistic they will make it to 1,000.
You can find their YouTube channel here.
