HomeChurch OnlineLive Streaming10 Church Live Streaming Providers to Consider

10 Church Live Streaming Providers to Consider

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Over the past couple years, ChurchTechToday has covered the topic of live streaming church services a number of times and from different angle. It seems that churches all over the world are interested in find out more about the relatively new practice of streaming one's services live via video over the internet. There are many reasons churches intend to reach people via live streaming: for the elderly who cannot physically attend services to missionaries out of the country, for people with Sunday work schedules, and for people interested in pursuing God but are afraid to step foot in a church.

Below is a list of article's we've published in the past on this topic:

Today's article intends on further  assisting churches in providing detailed information on live streaming companies in order to make an informed decision when looking to add this technology to their church communication arsenal.

Listed below you will find a comparison of the basic services offered from nine different providers.

The information is based on details provided on each companies website. I encourage you to look over the information and visit the companies websites to learn more about how they might help your church.

For ease, I've included links to each provider below the graphic.

list of livestreaming providers and their services for your church to consider

Boxcast

Set-Up Support
Real-time Monitoring
Automatic Updates
Social Media Integration
Live Streaming
Video Archiving with Playback
Ad-free
Mobile device support
Embed video into website
Online Campus interface
✓Audience Analytics
iOS & Android Apps
✓Roku App support
✓Apple TV App support
Expandable as ministry grows
Requires Special Equipment
Monthly Cost – begins $75 a month

ChurchStreaming.tv

Set-Up Support
✓Real-time Monitoring
Automatic Updates
✓Social Media Integration
✓Live Streaming
Video Archiving with Playback
Ad-free
Mobile device support
Embed video into website
✓Online Campus interface
Audience Analytics
✓iOS & Android Apps
Roku App support
Expandable as ministry grows
Requires Special Equipment
Monthly Cost – begins $139 a month

DaCast

Set-Up Support
Real-time Monitoring
Automatic Updates
Social Media Integration
Live Streaming
Video Archiving with Playback
Ad-free
Mobile device support
Embed video into website
Online Campus interface
Audience Analytics
iOS & Android Apps
Roku App support
Apple TV App support
Expandable as ministry grows
Requires Special Equipment
Monthly Cost – begins $25 a month

MyChurchWebsite

Set-Up Support
Real-time Monitoring
Automatic Updates
Social Media Integration
Live Streaming
Video Archiving with Playback
Ad-free
Mobile device support
Embed video into website
Online Campus interface
Audience Analytics
iOS & Android Apps
Roku App support
Apple TV App support
Expandable as ministry grows
Requires Special Equipment
Monthly Cost – begins $49 a month

SermonCast

Set-Up Support
Real-time Monitoring
Automatic Updates
Social Media Integration
Live Streaming
Video Archiving with Playback
Ad-free
Mobile device support
Embed video into website
Online Campus interface
Audience Analytics
iOS & Android Apps
Roku App support
Apple TV App support
Expandable as ministry grows
Requires Special Equipment
Monthly Cost – begins $15 a month

Streamingchurch.tv

Set-Up Support
Real-time Monitoring
Automatic Updates
Social Media Integration
Live Streaming
Video Archiving with Playback
Ad-free
Mobile device support
Embed video into website
Online Campus interface
Audience Analytics
iOS & Android Apps
Roku App support
Apple TV App support
Expandable as ministry grows
Requires Special Equipment
Monthly Cost – begins $49 a month

Streamspot

Set-Up Support
✓Real-time Monitoring
✓Automatic Updates
☐Social Media Integration
Live Streaming
Video Archiving with Playback
✓Ad-free
Mobile device support
Embed video into website
☐Online Campus interface
Audience Analytics
iOS & Android Apps
Roku App support
Apple TV App support
Expandable as ministry grows
Requires Special Equipment
Monthly Cost – begins $30 a month

Sundaystreams

Set-Up Support
Real-time Monitoring
Automatic Updates
Social Media Integration
Live Streaming
Video Archiving with Playback
Ad-free
Mobile device support
Embed video into website
Online Campus interface
Audience Analytics
iOS & Android Apps
Roku App support
Apple TV App support
Expandable as ministry grows
Requires Special Equipment
Monthly Cost – begins $49 a month

The Church Online

Set-Up Support
Real-time Monitoring
Automatic Updates
Social Media Integration
Live Streaming
Video Archiving with Playback
Ad-free
Mobile device support
Embed video into website
Online Campus interface
Audience Analytics
Roku App support
Apple TV App support
Expandable as ministry grows
Requires Special Equipment
Monthly Cost – not listed

Worship Channels

Set-Up Support
Real-time Monitoring
Automatic Updates
Social Media Integration
Live Streaming
Video Archiving with Playback
Ad-free
Mobile device support
Embed video into website
Online Campus interface
Audience Analytics
iOS & Android Apps
Roku App support
Apple TV App support
Expandable as ministry grows
Requires Special Equipment
Monthly Cost – begins $99 a month
This list is not comprehensive, but should give your church some good direction about what to look for when choosing a live streaming company to work with. There are many good providers out there with excellent features to consider.

If your church is already live streaming, what provider have you been using and how it is working for you at present?

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Ryan Holck
Ryan Holckhttps://rad-ideas.com
Ryan is the founder of RAD Ideas and Graphics.Church. He works with churches and denominations to grow their ministry through graphic design and marketing strategy. Follow Ryan at RAD-Ideas.com.

38 COMMENTS

  1. How is reliable is Sunday Streams. We are currently spending about $110 a month with sermon.net. I am leaning towards vimeo live or Sunday streams. Also I have checked out omnia.

  2. We use Sermon.net, which has about all the features as the “big box” companies listed above, but for $20/month. Plenty of bandwidth, all HD, can stream to up to 4 different places at once, integrates with vMix or OBS seamlessly, etc. GREAT customer service, so far, though I’ve used it very little. Easy to setup. Only issue is that we can’t queue up livestreams in advance, so I have to go in and change the master live stream episode before we do a stream. But it’s a small inconvenience for the money.

  3. Sunday Streams does free automatic updates for the first year only, then you pay. That’s who we use. Their immediate support when we have issues has been a lifesaver to us…

  4. Vplayed is one of the leading media streaming solution providers which help you launch your own church streaming website and app instantly with 100% customization. The solution is integrated with an easily accessible and highly customizable player to deliver an immense user experience to your audience which helps in growing business revenue. Moreover, Vplayed is wholly packed with diverse features that put a way to streamline your content on multiplatform. For more information, visit our website. https://www.vplayed.com/live-streaming-solution.php

  5. God bless for sharing such a fantastic analysis of the various streaming services. We used this site to help get us started with our streaming service over a year ago. Since we have a one man show running our AV program we had to keep things simple at first. StreamSpot was the easiest service around and paired with the Cerevo LiveShell Pro our AV guy was able to start a stream each Sunday by hitting the power button on the LiveShell Pro and the service was streaming to our sites within 30 seconds. The catch was StreamSpot does not provide a Adaptive Bit Rate players so you only get one stream quality which was usually at 480p with slight buffering. Once they raised their rates on early adopters from $49 to $79 a mo, we switched to Boxcast for $129 a mo because we get a static RTMP code which works with any encoder and have an adaptive bit rate player with unlimited viewers and unlimited storage each year. Since Streamspot charged $149 a mo for an adpative bit rate with for only 500 viewers and less than 500 GBs of storage we decided to make the switch since you don’t have to have the BoxCaster to stream. We looked at Vimeo Live but had to pay upfront the $900 a yr. or $139 a mo. Since Vimeo use a form of Content ID to detect music played from a CD/Spotify we decided to stick with StreamSpot. FYI.. CCLI and CCS do not provide copyright permission to stream music that’s played from a CD or streamed from Pandora or Spotify, only music that your band or choir sings that is streamed. You have to have a synchronization license as our Praise Dance Ministry found out the hard way.

  6. How is reliable is Sunday Streams. We are currently spending about $110 a month with sermon.net. I am leaning towards vimeo live or Sunday streams. Also I have checked out omnia.

  7. Cool stuff. Here I’d like to add one more solution named Contus Vplay, a complete video live streaming solution for A to Z media business. It is equipped for digital age live video streaming that demand high security and delivery optimization for several screen sizes. Using the live streaming solution, video content can also be optimized for multiple revenue models.

  8. Hi, this article isn’t up to date for http://www.dacast.com
    You can update the price of the 1st plan coming at $19/month.
    We are completely ad free now and responsive.
    Another feature is Apple TV + Roku support that wasn’t offered before.
    A quick update might be required.
    Cheers

  9. Glad you posted this article… what is the latest insight regarding people using Facebook Live to stream a service, particularly from a legal standpoint?

  10. Save the money. Use YouTube live streaming (free to 501c3 organizations. At the YouTube site, download the free version of WireCast (limited ability but you can pay for the full version). Embed player code into the FREE ChurchOnlinePlatform service (churchonlineplatform.com). We just dropped SundayStreams and will be using YouTube via ChurchOnlinePlatform this Sunday (live.familylife.church)

    • YouTube live can be a good starting point for a church to see if they want to stream. However, they do need to be aware that everything comes with either a price or a catch. They have very limited features that most churches want to use. You have to deal with the ads. Also, we have found that they are always turning off the channels when it detects certain music even if you have submitted your CCLI license to them. You never know when it is just going to block your account because their algorithm detected music in the video.

      • Re: music on the stream…We have encountered “after the fact” copyright claims, but have not once had our channel shut down during a stream. We display our CCLI streaming license as a bug any time music is being performed, and also include a card for it in the credits. I’ve found that the great majority of copyright claims are to unspecified “music societies,” and they go away as soon as I submit a dispute. I also found that two large companies (one of them was Sony) rejected our disputes. In each case we were singing an old hymn, from a hymnbook, which is fully covered under our streaming license. However, each company claimed that this infringed on a contemporary arrangement of the tune. No big deal: by the time the dispute process was completed the service was so stale that I doubt anyone will ever see the ads they are now entitled to put on those two videos. 🙂

        • Those are some great points, Matt. Your church is very lucky to have a volunteer such as yourself that works very hard for them. We do find that many churches feel it is a hassle to have to submit the disputes and keep up with that sort of stuff. But each church is different. I am happy to see the church use any platform for distributing their video as it is such a great tool for spreading the message.

    • We have been using YouTube live streaming since last Easter. Overall it has been a good experience for us and for our small group of viewers. (We’re a small but mighty congregation!) The only major problem we have experienced (encoding through the full version of WireCast) is that any stream above 480p is choking somewhere between us and them, and Google offers its usual “look it up” support rather than live help. But the positives include ubiquitous viewing on just about any platform, support for our social media outlets, and a free “DVR”-style archive.

    • Thanks for the article Ryan and for your response Aaron! We actually had used Youtube in the past before it had the features it does nowadays and we have tried Facebook Live as well, which was a good alternative. But since Facebook Live wasn’t out and Youtube didn’t have what we needed at the time we were using Sermon.net, but were having issues with a few different things, including not very good support, latency problems, and our bill going up about $5 every month! I can also say that I have personally tried Sunday Streams and ChurchStreaming.tv and I ended up just feeling like something was lacking. For one, ChurchStreaming.tv doesn’t have a great design and was hard for me to navigate through. Sunday Streams was a little better, but still not as user friendly as I was hoping ( I have to train volunteers as well ), not to mention a little expensive for my churches needs. I had the same experience with Sermon.net unfortunately. During all of that time experiencing the different software out there for churches I learned what they had and what they lacked. So eventually I decided to just make my own, and a year and a half later I now run a company that’s dedicated to making software to help churches function. We have a Livestream product called Omnia Livestream that my church has been using for a few months now. Obviously, I’m a little biased with this, but I really do feel it has fixed all of our issues as well as solving problems that Youtube and Facebook couldn’t fix, such as having things customized to be a “church experience” for our users. It’s super easy to use for both media leaders as well as volunteers. I even built an automated process that allows my church to only hit “start” and “stop” recording and the Episode details are filled in automatically for each service.
      And the best part… I made it free. We have a Forever Free Plan that will be Free… Forever… haha. That way any church can get going easily. We do have paid Add-Ons if you want more, but the free plan comes with what most of these other providers have in their paid plans. Check it out and verify for yourself. 🙂
      Lastly, if you still want to use Youtube and Facebook Live, like my church does to reach as many people as possible, we have a integrations with Youtube and Facebook to automatically stream your services whenever you start streaming.
      Anyway, that’s enough of that for now. If you guys have experienced similar issues to what I have, check out Omnia Livestream and see if you think we solved the problem.
      http://www.omnia-app.org

  11. Maybe I’m misunderstanding “requires special equipment,” but while boxcast requires the boxcaster, worship channels allows you to encode with a computer, as does ChurchStreaming.tv. I know ChurchStreaming.tv has the churchstreamer box, but it’s not required (although I would recommend hardware over software).

    I thought that needed some clarification.

  12. About 3 months ago we switched from LiveStream, who we had a myriad of problems with, including having our 4 years of archive deleted after a billing mix up, to ChurchStreaming.tv and we could not be happier. As the Technical Director for the church, and owner of a company that does large venue AV installations, what struck me first was the knowledge of the REAL human beings you can actually TALK to. Rob & Robbie at ChurchStreaming.tv really know their stuff. We are using their new streaming encoder, which allows us to have multibit rate encoding. We integrated our stream into a ChurchOnline.org site to give it a more polished look. We had a Sunday about 3 weeks ago where the stream wouldn’t work. Submitted a trouble ticket and about 15 mins later I got a call (at 1045am on a sunday) from Robbie at ChurchStreaming.tv. We weren’t able to determine what the problem was, but the next day I got an email from him explaining it was a server issue, and that they had developed a server status page for customers to check the status of the live streaming servers. To me that is EXCELLANT customer service. FYI, I have no affiliation with ChurchSTreaming.tv other than being a very satisfied customer, and would definitely recommend them to another church.

    Ryan Hobson
    Technical Director
    Heritage Baptist Church
    Owensboro, KY
    http://Www.hbcowensboro.org

      • Thanks Lauren. This is actually the first time I have ever posted at a site like this. I appreciate the encouragement! I have always considered submitting to a blog or publication on a regular basis. Any tips you can provide?

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