We live in a time marked by terms like “responsive web design,” “mobile optimized,” or “mobile first.” While mobile computing has been the lingua franca of the developing world for some time, in the United States, we've just recently become accustomed to thinking of ways to optimize for a growing segment of web traffic that comes from people using both smart phones and tablets, not as their secondary computing devices, but as their primary ones.
People are consuming content from their mobile devices, but what about the other side of the equation? Are people creating from these devices? Yes. You can podcast from your smart phone. You can take video and edit it on your tablet. But, does this also apply to live streaming? Yes and no.
With the continual pressures of budgets pushing against the desire for creative, technology-rich services, church techies often look for what can do the job, not necessarily what was built to do it. Combine that with the emergence of service like Meerkat and Periscope and you know that churches will try and stream from mobile devices, as well as to them.
As with all technologies, there are trade-offs that you should be aware of when considering if you should live-stream from mobile. There are good reasons to do it and good reasons to avoid it. There are also ways to get around some of the problems which churches that live-streaming with traditional production equipment don't face.
Mobile devices are designed to be portable. If you're a part of a mobile church or need to live-stream from a mission trip, retreat, or some other temporary location, it can be very tempting to use a technology that fits in your pocket or backpack instead of one that fits in a road case.
This advantage evaporates when you have church in your own building week in and week out. Pulling a phone out of your pocket, attaching it to a tripod, and to both power and audio cables, is actually harder than live-streaming with an installed system that just needs to be powered on.
Smaller size comes at a cost in terms of production, too. Large, heavy cameras don't shake easily. Put one on a tripod and you'll have a rock-solid shot. A smart phone is so small and light that it takes no effort to move. Even when placed on a tripod, it's easy to accidentally bump and knock it over. Contrast that with a studio pedestal which, were it not for its wheels, you'd have trouble moving at all.
Mobile devices are limited in their capabilities. In smaller venues, putting a mobile phone on a tripod in the back of the room may not give you the best image. Closer will tend to be better. Depending on the device, you may be able to use digital zoom to get a larger image without a loss of quality, but unlike optical zoom, you are just making a portion of the image larger. With a camera that has a 4K sensor, this isn't an issue if you're streaming at 1080p or 720p. If you're using older hardware, which captures at 1080p or 720p, using digital zoom to magnify part of the image will cause a loss of sharpness.
In larger venues, this could be a problem, depending on camera location. If your church building seats several hundred people, placing a mobile device in the back of the room won't give you an image that's close enough to give adequate detail, even with digital zoom.
Unlike production cameras, mobile devices don't natively take balanced audio signals. Some churches ignore this fact and just use the on-board microphone. No matter the size of your church, this won't give you the best results. A better solution is to get an adapter that allows you to send audio from your house sound system to the mobile device.
Controlling zoom, focus, and exposure on a mobile device isn't easy. As long as you are fine setting them before church, this isn't a huge problem, but if you need to change any of these three, you'll be touching the screen, and potentially affecting your shot in ways that you don't want to.
Mobile devices have limited streaming options. There are apps like Periscope, Meerkat, and others, but not every live-streaming host allows you to stream from mobile. Some also limit which OS you can use to live stream. For example, YouTube allows you to live stream with an app called mobile capture, but it's only available on Android. According to its description (https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6261647?hl=en), it's designed for capturing game play, so it may not be ideal for live-streaming your church services.
If you'd really prefer to use a particular service, live-streaming on mobile is harder. You can't just fire up Adobe Flash Media Live Encoder and set up an RTMP or HLS stream the way you can with a desktop computer.
Most of the time, mobile live-streaming uses only one video source. If you're doing a simple stream and you only want one camera, this isn't a problem, but if you imagine adding in a feed from your worship software or other cameras, it gets more complicated. Some mobile devices can send video out over HDMI or a similar interface, but the video is going to have a certain degree of latency and have the camera UI over-layed on it.
How do you overcome these problems? Each problem has a solution. The question is whether, given your situation, you care about the problem or consider the solution worth pursuing.
To counteract the small size of mobile devices, you can mount them on tripods that are secured to something heavy. There are a variety of mounting solutions that add a 1/4 20 thread to a smart phone or tablet to make it easy to secure them to a tripod so that you can get a more stable shot.
In order to get a closer shot without relying on digital zoom, you might consider a third-party lens that affixes to the mobile device. Like all zoom lenses, any one of these will magnify motion as well as the image, so make sure you have the device on a stable tripod.
To add more sources to your stream, consider using an app like Switcher Studio (https://switcherstudio.com/en/). Using wifi, this app lets you stream to RTMP live-streaming hosts and let's you switch between multiple sources (up to four) cutting and dissolving as you would with a video switcher. However, there is a monthly fee.
Another option is to do a hybrid system. Software like Wirecast (http://telestream.net/wirecast/overview.htm?__c=1) lets you connect a mobile device to a computer and use that device as a wireless camera. This might be an option if you'd like to include video from your worship software and latency won't cause you problems (as it would if you were using the video for IMAG).
Live-streaming from mobile is possible for most churches, but the problems that come along with it make it less desirable if you have other options. The exception to this might be for small remote live-streams, where you can't justify the time to tear down your main system and install it remotely, or where you can't afford the cost to rent gear. Other than that, it might be better for most churches to consider other more robust solutions.
