live streaming

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.

Live streaming isn't right for every church. In an ideal world, equipment would be cheap and every church would have the infrastructure to host their own service via live stream. Now, many churches are struggling to make something work in a short amount of time because of COVID-19. This isn't a perfect world and while God isn't surprised, many churches have been. So, with that thought in mind, what are some things you can do today to maintain community and meet other than live streaming?

Churches have been scrambling to get their live streaming quality dialed in since the COVID-19 pandemic has spread around the world. Many churches are facing an urgent need to stream their services in order to stay connected to their congregation while we practice "social distancing." The challenge is that a lot of live streaming setups take time to test and calibrate before things run smoothly. When it comes to live streaming, quality audio is key. Here are the most important things you can do to improve your live stream audio quality fast.