church live stream

The practice of live streaming church services has gained popularity over the last few years. The impacts of COVID-19 certainly accelerated the move to live streaming for many churches. We've compiled this list to help you navigate the myriad of live streaming providers available. 

Now that COVID-19 has dramatically limited in-person meetings for some churches and eliminated them altogether for others, live streaming has become the norm, even in more traditional denominations. Worship software, which used to display merely lyrics and scripture to people attending in-person on a screen, is now the backbone of the online or video church service.

Live video is key to getting your church’s message out. Whether you are broadcasting to displays around your building, to a TV station, Livestreaming or just archiving, excellent live video can set your church apart. According to a study by released by Brightcove, poor quality video presentations influence viewers to have a negative perception of the author. This negatively impacts engagement with the organization. So, it’s important to ensure your livestreams and broadcasts are the highest quality possible, both in production and delivery.

I have been leading worship in a full-time capacity for twenty-two years. Still, nothing could have prepared me for a global pandemic, hybrid worship, and a situation that began in our church on Sunday, March 15, 2020. On that Sunday, our worship team did most everything we would normally do on Sunday with one major difference… there was no congregation in our worship space!  Like most churches across the country, and around the world, we found ourselves in an unprecedented scenario. One no one could have foreseen and one for which no seminary education could have prepared us. Our church had to learn how to minister to our people solely through livestream technology on Sundays and Zoom meetings throughout the week. 

While it's possible to live-stream with a single camera and a software encoder, or even with multiple smartphones, using a video switcher is the way many churches should do it. First, what's a video switcher? A video switcher is NOT a selector switch that you'd pick up from a big online or electronics retailer. While it does the same thing, select video sources, it does so without the visual glitch on the screen that a selector produces.

With the COVID-19 pandemic, we’ve had to contend with a new normal. Phrases like 'social distancing' and 'contact tracing' weren’t familiar terms until a few weeks ago. Large gatherings aren’t safe anymore, so we’re all turning to online forms of meeting and communication. This, of course, includes weekly church services. With state governors ordering people to shelter in place, church leaders were left scrambling in recent weeks to ramp up or start from scratch with online streaming services and more.

How do you get better production with limited resources when people will be sitting in seats that you used to be able to shoot from? That's where a multi-camera production comes in. In the past, multi-camera live streaming production has been very expensive. SwitcherStudio for iOS changes all that.

With the government temporarily requiring churches around the nation to shut their doors in response to COVID-19, online worship services are becoming the new norm. We don’t know how this will affect the way we do church in the long term. For the next few weeks or months, your church needs to figure out how to make an online worship service feel more like the real thing and welcome people who’ve never experienced a live stream service before.