How to Begin Streaming Live Church Services
By Adam Noyes
Restream.io recently created a great guide to Church and house of worship streaming. This is a very popular area for those who stream regularly. We’re going to take a look at the finer parts of their article below.
For ages, people have been regularly attending church services, such as group singing or praying, to be closer to God. But modern life is changing. Sometimes it becomes so unpredictable that people can’t physically attend a ceremony — but they may not want to miss it, even being in another city or country. Sometimes even people from other parts of the planet want to join a sermon, and fortunately, both situations become easily solvable nowadays through the power of the Internet, which allows for streaming live church services online and lets churches get closer to their followers, despite any distance.
Churches all over the world actively use digital technologies and communicate with their congregations through websites, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, which are known as the most important communication channels, surpassing email, events, print, etc. And since live video is one of the leading forms of content on social media, broadcasting is likely to become the next step to make church services even more accessible for people.
The advantages of sermon broadcasting include:
- Possibility to engage people who cannot attend worship personally.
- Being closer to the members of your parish and providing support wherever they are and whatever they experience in their lives.
- Sharing inspiring live videos easily and encouraging more people to join your community.
- Bringing church to more people’s lives.
- Soliciting donations for further live video development.
Before moving on to actual streaming, let’s dive into the basics.
Getting started with live video
With all those benefits in mind, you may want to start broadcasting your first video as soon as possible. But before that, make sure you have everything set.
Below, you will find the details that will help you get familiar with camera settings and lighting design, choose the recording gear and streaming platform that would perfectly meet your goals, and more.
Choosing the right gear for a church live stream
The first step is, of course, a nice camera that will help you make videos of good quality. There is a rich assortment of church live streaming equipment from which you can choose either more affordable or high-budget solutions. It all depends on how much you are ready to spend.
To get the sermon across, you basically need a camera recording in HD and featuring an HDMI output. This is enough if you have a relatively small amount of money for planned spending or don’t strive for super-professional quality of BBC level. You can, however, purchase a camera or camcorder that costs up to 1,000 dollars. If you plan to go with high-end video production, we recommend considering one of the top camcorders that capture video in UHD 4K up to 30 fps.
These are our top picks:
- Canon Vixia HF G21: a great solution for newbies who just plan to go live with worship.
- Panasonic 4K Cinema-Like Video Camera Camcorder: effectively works in low light.
- Canon EOS REBEL T7i: belongs to DSLR cameras and also works well in poor lighting conditions.
- IP live camera AXIS M3045-V: good for shooting from different perspectives and streaming directly to your site, where parishioners can watch the worship live.
- Canon XA15: high-budget and usually attracts people who are more familiar with the technology.
- Sony PXW-Z150: captures videos in UHD 4K up to 30 fps and provides a lot of professional features that make it one of the best cameras for live streaming church services.
Regardless of the camera you choose, it should meet the basic requirements in categories such as:
- Frame rate
- Shutter speed or motion control
- Aperture or depth of field
- Gain or image noise (aka ISO)
- Resolution
Encoders
Another tool that plays a significant role in church live streaming setup is an encoder, which is needed to transfer the information to a communicable format for broadcasting services. Depending on your purposes and needs, you can choose from software or hardware encoders. They both bring much value to their users, although a software encoder is more suitable for those who are not professional broadcasters and are hunting for cheaper, more accessible, and easy-to-use solutions.
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