If you have ever gone through a remodel or a build, personally, or even as a ministry leader you know the decisions are endless. To plan and think ahead of all that you need now and what you might need over the next decade brings a level of excitement and stress that you do not know unless you have walk down that path. Every decision is mixed with many new layers of decisions. A leader has to think of what meets the needs of today but also allows the growth of the vision and changes in our culture in the immediate and long term future.
Over the last month, so many churches and ministries have moved into new and expanded buildings. Some had never used or needed the new spaces and others had only used them as extra space for those bonus moments. However, in the last month leaders have had to abruptly and in lightening speed move all their ministry and people into a new space. Most without any training to them, their leaders, or the people we hope would follow up. Think of it, it was like moving your church building on a Thursday and then trying to communicate with everyone where it was now located and nobody had a GPS to help.
In this time I have had several conversations with leaders on different methods and tools that we can use and put in our newly relocated digital building. I am going to outline a few areas and a few tools I have found to be helpful and I am using them. In this first part, we are going to focus on Church Services themselves.
Church Services
This one is not hard in the sense to answer how, but we will talk about it a few minutes. Most churches have leaned in on live-streaming their services in one way or another. Everybody has done different formats and that is great. What I want to talk about is if you live stream how you can do it. I have been live streaming services for over a decade in one way or another.
Facebook:
The easiest and fastest is Facebook. Most know about it if they use Facebook. I have used it for many years. The positives of Facebook are that is it is free and it gives you a very large possible audience.
However, one main point I will mention is that I do not depend on Facebook exclusively. It is an end destination, not the main source of our stream. Meaning, we use a paid service that hosts our service. More on that later. The negatives are since you do not pay for it, you are not promised or guaranteed any quality, space, or support. Technically we have had issues at times with Facebook directly with the compression they have used to keep our stream not taking to much space in their system and dropping quality in the process. I also am not a fan of the lack of engagement or maybe you could say the distractions Facebook has while watching. In the end, I see Facebook as a great place to market, keep in front of our people, and do short and simple ways to guide and encourage. While I can be encouraged to see the thousands that view (read this to learn more about numbers) the reality is there is the low engagement I look at too. Just take a look at the average time your service was watched on Facebook.
So what about the other sources for our stream. Something that gives us a stable source for the stream. These will allow us to then embed (place) it on our website, share it Facebook, Youtube, and about any place you can imagine.
There are many options and many have popped up in advertising in the last two months. I cannot speak to those. The two I will share I have used and would happily share with you.
Boxcast
For over two years we used Boxcast as our base system. It was super simple. At the end of the day, you just need to connect an HDMI cord or an RCA (red, yellow, and white) cord to their box and you are ready to stream. The rest is done on their website and is pretty simple. You log in and tell the box when you want to stream. When you schedule an event, it will stream it. You can easily embed the stream into your website, send it to Facebook, and a variety of social connections. It also has an app on Roku and Apple TV’s so it is easy to watch that way too. Depending on options and promotions this runs right under $1200 a year. It is very professional and is even mobile. We even streamed a service from their iPhone app to all of the above places. The only reason we left this platform, as we went to Vimeo so we could do a software video mixer to take a small step in upgrading our equipment. Overall, I loved Boxcast.
Vimeo
As mentioned we moved to Vimeo this year so I for sure want to recommend it. For one, it is a little cheaper than Boxcast by what averages out to be $20 a month. It also allows you to use their software Livestream Studio for free. Vimeo and Livestream are now one company so I will not talk about Livestream as a platform other than to say they are the same, and Vimeo is cheaper. You can also use phones as remote cameras to create multiple cameras with other cameras or just mobile phones. The software gives a lot of pro options that make your stream look more professional and give it a better appearance to those watching. I will not take time to share the details and all the ins and outs, just know you have those options. You can also embed this on your site and use it to store previous services to be watched later. Vimeo also has connections to your social media including Facebook. Most smart TV’s also have a Vimeo app that people can use to watch your stream too.
Equipment
In all of the above, the key is to get a good video and good audio. The sermon is the easy part, the worship is often the difficult part. Specifically to the good audio. From issues with learning about compression on your end and the platform side, this takes time and sometimes helps. Depending on how many vocals and instruments you have, it can be harder for some than others. Some elect to stream just the sermon for these reasons. Also, make sure you have a copyright authority to stream music if you do decide to stream worship. There are endless numbers of options for the video and audio.
Last all of the above quality depends as much on your internet quality and speeds as anything. You can only do so much if your internet is at a low speed. This is a reason we originally went with Boxcast because all of the encodings is done in their box which allowed us the best quality possible at the time. The best thing you can do is do be hardwired and not depend on wifi if you can keep from it.
Feel free to ask questions and we will try to answer them as quickly as possible or to write more about it.
