"For The Chapel, it was about allowing thousands of other people to attend church in their own community, worship with a worship leader and live band, and then receive the highest quality teaching via video from the transmitting campus," states Bruce Smith of Church Solutions Group in Chicago, Ill. He's describing why their client, The Chapel, uses streaming to bring one pastor's teaching to multiple campuses around the greater Chicago area.
Having explored numerous options such as satellite, fiber, sneaker-net (manually carrying the video to the campuses), and streaming, The Chapel chose streaming using encoders and decoders from HaiVision (Montreal, Quebec, Can.) as their solution. The Chapel takes a live video feed of their teaching pastor, encodes the video into a format that can be transmitted over the Internet, and sends that video to each of their remote campuses. At each remote campus, it is decoded by another HaiVision decoder and recorded for later use at that campus or in some cases, shown time-slipped by just a few minutes.
The Chapel isn't alone - many churches are looking to expand their reach through Internet video. And streaming isn't only for transmitting video between campuses.
"Streaming media, the live transmission of audio and video over the Internet, has provided faith-based organizations with a cost-effective way to reach anyone, virtually anywhere, through computers, cell phones and mobile devices," states Dave Stoner, president and CEO of Plano, Texas-based 's ViewCast. Streaming enables a church to make their church services and events available immediately, expanding the reach of your church to people unable to attend in person.
What Is Streaming?
Streaming enables you to take any audio or video source and use the Internet as your method of transmission, opening up the communication to anyone in the world.
"At a basic level, there are four key steps in a typical streaming setup, with the content following this linear flow," explains Mike Nann, director of marketing and communications for Digital Rapids of Markham, Ont., Can.:
audio or video source → streaming encoder → streaming distribution server or service → viewer or listener
"The streaming encoder is used to transform the source signal," Nann continues, "into a web-friendly stream. This transformation involves compression (to ‘squeeze' the video and audio signals down to a data rate that can be streamed over network and Internet connections) and ‘wrapping' the compressed video and audio into a format and protocol used to transport the content."
For campus-to-campus transmission, the video signal is then sent directly to the receiving campus's decoder. But for "broadcasting" to numerous viewers, another path is taken.
"The resulting stream is sent from the streaming encoder to a distribution (streaming) server or external service (Content Delivery Network, or CDN)," says Nann, "from which the content is delivered to viewers. Note that in a typical situation with multiple viewers, there is generally not any direct connection between the viewer and the encoder - they connect only to the distribution server or CDN."
The reason for the CDN is to enable the church to have many more viewers than the average church's Internet connection could otherwise support. The CDN is hosted by an outside company that specializes in video streaming for numerous clients; they have the enormous Internet bandwidth required for numerous viewers that a church would not normally have. With the services of a CDN, the church only needs an Internet connection large enough to support one direct "viewer" - which is the CDN service. The CDN then redistributes that video stream to all those wanting to watch the video.
Infrastructure
So what's needed to enable your church to stream?
First, you need an Internet connection that can support the connection to the CDN or remote site. "Typically for HD you would like to have at least six Mbps per stream," states Peter Maag, senior vice president of sales and marketing for HaiVision. "For standard definition, you can get away with about 1.5 Mbps per stream but preferably a bit more."
And it's important to note that this is the upload speed. "When Internet Service Providers (ISP) promote the speed of their service, the number they're citing is generally the download speed," cautions Nann. "On all but the highest-end offerings, the upload speed is significantly less. For example, a service provider local to us offers a service package with 12 Mbps download speed - but the upload speed is only one Mbps."
Next, you need an encoding system. "Selection of your streaming media encoder is another important element of successful web-based video delivery," says Stoner. "Encoding technologies have now advanced in operational simplicity to the point that most churches wanting to stream video no longer require a full-time technical expert. Streaming video appliances are now available that include streamlined embedded operating systems optimized for all the tasks required to encode and deliver video over the Internet."
It's worth noting at this point that the bandwidth demands needed to watch a streaming video on your phone is very different than that needed for watching it in HD on your home computer, or for showing the video on a 20-foot screen at a remote campus. Therefore, when streaming to support individual viewers, it's good if the church can offer multiple bandwidth options.
"The hardware selected should be capable of addressing multiple stream sizes and multiple system destinations simultaneously, eliminating the need to have multiple encoders," states Maag. "But remember that if the church is offering a choice of multiple streams," Nann adds, "its Internet connection must be fast enough to send those streams out together - at least as fast as the sum of the bitrates of the streams. For example, if you're offering a 384 Kbps stream and a 768 Kbps stream, your outgoing Internet connection must be at least 1,152 Kbps."
Common Mistakes
While streaming has become easier than many might think, there are some common mistakes that churches make, which our three experts shared.
First, churches often don't obtain sufficient upload bandwidth from their ISP.
Production quality is also often underrated. A good signal from a quality video camera with appropriate lighting for video will go a long way to making your streaming efforts a success. An old computer adage applies equally well to streaming: "Garbage in, garbage out."
You should also have a dedicated Internet connection for your streaming. Sharing a connection with the church network can cut into your available upload bandwidth and interfere with your transmission.
And lastly, be careful not to stream too high a quality signal. If your viewers don't have a download connection that can keep up with your bit rate, the result will be video that frequently stalls to buffer more video, and will likely cost you viewers.
And as with most topics that are covered at Church Production Magazine, don't underestimate the importance of bringing on an experienced consultant to get you started. Their experience and knowledge may save you many times over their consulting fee by making sure you do it right the first time, instead of the fourth or fifth.
