Live Streaming

As a church, you are constantly looking for ways to make an impact in your community. How do you reach people with the good news of the Gospel? Are there ways that are more strategic than others? What are the ‘out of the box’ ideas that can make us unique? We’ve heard your plea for new ideas and we’ve come up with one stellar way to help your church “go and make disciples of all nations.” What is this brilliant idea? Creating a missional church live stream.

You might read blog posts that insist that live streaming is going to kill the local church. To paraphrase Mark Twain, the death of the local church has been greatly exaggerated. In addressing upcoming church trends, Carey Nieuwhof mentions that after his church started a live stream they ended up with more online attendees than in-person attendees.  Live streaming didn't kill the church, but it did make them pause to consider how best to reach those online attendees.

Vacation Bible School (VBS) is one of the largest outreach events at your church. Kids from the community flock to your open doors and parents are excited to have faith-based fun draw their children away from video games. This year, if you want to take your outreach event a step further, consider doing a live stream of your VBS program.

In the church tech world, live streaming is still relatively new and many churches are on the fence about it. In this article, we’ll walk you through five myths about church live streaming so you can decide if it’s right for your church.

We hear from lots of people who’ve chosen a software encoder for their church live streaming solution.  They tell us it's complicated and unreliable. Unanticipated problems can quickly change your joyful noise into frustration with a stream that’s dropping frames and frozen software. In the end, a dedicated hardware encoder can solve many of the problems encountered with software encoders and simplify church live streaming for volunteers. Here's how to avoid the software encoder blues.

Live streaming is becoming less of a technical novelty and more a requirement for many churches--something that makes a lot of sense. Sure, online live streaming technology allows you to broadcast and distribute your message around the world, but it also allows you to reach local community members that may not be able to make it to church every week (or at all). Sure, online live streaming technology allows you to broadcast and distribute your message around the world, but it also allows you to reach local community members that may not be able to make it to church every week (or at all). The question is, can they hear you? You know that audio is the most important part of any live stream, right?

One of the most common live-streaming questions people have when they're first getting started is "what do I need?" Often the chorus of "just use your phone" drowns out the advice from people who know the limitations of that advice. In most circumstances, a single phone in the back of the sanctuary isn't going to do as good a job as a camcorder connected to an encoder. Normally, the steps from a single phone to a multi-camera live-stream, with graphics, are like a maze. You can go a long way down a single path only to find that you've hit a dead-end and have to turn around and start over again. Not so with the SlingStudio Multi-Camera Live Streaming Platform from the folks at Dish Network. Its major strength is that it eliminates the dead ends.

Facebook's free live streaming services have opened up a world of opportunity for churches to reach out to their audience through live video content. Churches love the number of people who are able to watch their Facebook live videos, however, there are problems with accurately tracking the number of attendees. Often these numbers are even inflated and may rarely include new people which can be bad news for churches. So what is this service actually providing and is it worth it?