Live streaming your services can be a great addition to your your ministry. What do you need to consider first?
- Go on the cheap and use Facebook , YouTube or..
- Use a pay for service like Stream Monkey or Live Stream.
- Start out with consumer grade equipment or buy pro?
- One camera shot or more?
- What will the sound input be?
- Acquire license to stream worship music?
- Will musicians accept their worship performance being online?
These are all real world questions I had to answer before streaming our services. Our church runs under 500 so the budget doesn’t allow for big expenditures without establishing some idea of it’s worth to our mission. That’s why I chose the free option and stream to YouTube with the OBS encoder. I use consumer camcorders and the Imillet HDMI to USB capture devices to get the video into the computer. It’s all done on Linux, of coarse. 🙂 By far the biggest challenge has been sound. I’m coming out of the board into the computer and thankfully OBS has an audio/video sync option which corrects that. I’ve also learned that compression is my friend here but don’t over do it. I’ve acquired the CCLI streaming license. but at this time we don’t stream the worship music. Will your worship team like hearing themselves online? Probably not. Consumer grade equipment and free services like Facebook and YouTube just don’t allow for high quality sound. If they can accept that great, but don’t be surprised if you meet resistance in this area. Finally, you might want to ask yourself if you have the staff or volunteers to do this on a consistent basis. Personally, I don’t like to add a new feature to the ministry unless I’m pretty sure we can pull it off consistently. Much of the ground work will most likely be on you so ask yourself if you’re OK with that and if so roll up your sleeves and press on!
