What line-array sound systems were to the 1990s in houses of worship, and what HD and IMAG video was in the aughts, the second decade of the 21st century is all about streaming. The packetization of audio and/or video into digital file formats known as codecs (short for “encode/decode”) and transmission of those files over the Internet, streaming has seemingly taken the church world by storm. In some ways, it has already changed the fabric of worship technology culture, aiding a shift from the megachurch, which in large part defined the notion of house-of-worship infrastructure in the 1990s and early 2000s, to the more recent and rapidly expanding concept of the satellite church.
According to Todd Rhoades, whose Monday Morning Insight website monitors church trends, the number of satellite church facilities in the U.S. increased from about 100 in 1998 to an estimated 2,000 a decade later. This growth has been driven by a number of factors, including the need to go where potential congregants are rather than wait for them to come to a central location. But the increased availability of broadband Internet and more affordable and easier-to-use streaming technologies interfaced with AV systems has enabled much of that expansion.
The basics
Simply put, streaming is like cable television over the Internet. With live streaming, content, in the form of audio and video as well as text, can be sent in real time over an Ethernet connection. The basic components are a camera and microphone for the media, an encoder to digitize the content, a media publisher, and a content delivery network (CDN) to distribute and deliver the content.
Streaming has gained traction in churches and elsewhere as the availability and bandwidth of broadband has increased and its cost has declined. As bandwidth—literally, the capacity of the Internet “pipe” to channel data through—increased, streaming was able to encompass uncompressed HD video, at resolution rates of 720p and beyond. HD video generally requires a connection speed of 10 Mbit/second or greater.
Today, media can be streamed either live or on-demand. Live streams are generally provided by “true streaming,” which sends the information straight to the computer or device without saving the file to a hard disk. On-demand streaming is provided by a means called “progressive streaming,” which saves the file to a hard disk and then is played back from that on-demand.
Why are you streaming in the first place? Do you need to start out in fifth gear with HD video, or should you just begin with audio streaming?
Streaming media storage size is calculated from the streaming bandwidth and length of the media using the following formula (for a single user and file).
Codecs are the file basis of streaming. Audio streams are compressed using an audio codec such as MP3, Vorbis or AAC; the video stream is compressed using a video codec such as H.264 or VP8. Combined encoded audio and video streams are assembled in a container bitstream such as MP4, FLV, WebM, ASF or ISMA. The most advanced streaming uses what's known as adaptive streaming, which works by detecting a user's bandwidth and CPU capacity in real time and adjusting the quality of a video stream accordingly.
Not for everyone
Not every church will have multiple locations, and streaming, as technically accessible and attractive as it has become, isn't necessarily what every church needs to do immediately. “I think one of the biggest challenges for churches now from a technology point of view is understanding what they would actually do with streaming,” says William Jarrett, director of media, production and operations at Trinity Church, the oldest continuously operating house of worship in New York City, dating back to the American Revolution and in whose churchyard several of the country's Founding Fathers, including Alexander Hamilton, are buried. Jarrett enjoys a unique historical perspective — Trinity is a religious media pioneer; the church began radio broadcasts of its services since the 1950s and it began televising its services in 1985. It's come quite a ways since then. Its newly finished control room, with a Blackmagic Design AV router and For-A HVS-390HS 1.5 M/E production switcher that will take input from a total of 13 cameras in the sanctuary, including Panasonic robotic AW-HE120 PTZ and AK-HC1800G cameras, supports Trinity's own extensive streaming operations.
But Jarrett says churches need to be clear about what they expect streaming of their services and other events to accomplish. “Do you want to stream services because other churches are also doing it?” he asks. “Is it to build an online community? For evangelism? To raise funds? It's amazing how many churches can't answer those questions.” These are questions he says he gets often, as his experience—he did his first streaming project in 1996, on what he jokingly calls “Livestream v. 1.1” and guided Trinity's first webcast in 2002—draws in other church technicians to seek his opinions on the topic.
Trenchant questions aside, Jarrett doesn't discourage colleagues at other churches from trying streaming. However, he often advises churches new to technology to begin with audio only. “I do try to get some of the church [technical] directors who come here to see what we've done to look at audio,” he says. “I tell them, if you have a PA system, microphones, a mixer and a computer, you're already just a content delivery network away from streaming audio. Start there instead of trying to build an entire video-streaming infrastructure from scratch, even if the technology is getting less and less expensive. Think of audio as your proof-of-concept. You'll have a better basis for moving to streaming video in the future.”
The future
But the future of worship will definitely include streaming media, and the future is here, in part because streaming has become easier. Keith Miller, technical director of Mountain Springs Church in Colorado Springs, Colo., remembers that when he first moved to streaming it was with a collection of disparate servers that a church IT volunteer had corralled. Today, he says, the church, which he moved to in 2011, now uses LiveStream, which provides cloud-based servers and is virtually plug-and-play, and provides unlimited data storage and video-on-demand services for as little as $50 a month. “I wish they would have had this when I was just starting out,” he laments.
But plug-and-play in some ways makes it easier to also make mistakes, Miller cautions. For instance, as the equipment becomes more transparent to operate, it's easy to forget that for some services most of the audience is online. “When the pastor comes on stage, he has to remember to greet everyone, including those who are watching from home,” he explains. “You have to actively make them feel like they're part of the service.”
He's also discovered some of the more nuanced aspects of streaming media, such as the fact that the often-significant difference in volume between music, which can often approach 100 dB inside the church, and the spoken parts of the services, such as the sermon, which clocks in closer to 70 dB, create a problem for online listeners. (Keep in mind that the decibel scale is logarithmic, so that difference in level is quite substantial.) To address that, Miller uses two separate audio streams—one directly from an output of the church's Digico SD9 FOH console and another from an SD11 mixer connected via Digico Little Blue and Little Red racks in the church's video control room to handle separate audio mixes for live and Internet streams of their services, their volumes normalized to each other for the online stream. A bit complex, but more consistent than trying to constantly ride the faders to keep volumes similar.
What all this underscores is the fact that, as streaming becomes easier to access, churches cannot allow simpler technology let them overlook some fundamental issues: why are we streaming in the first place? Do we need to start out in fifth gear with HD video, or should we just begin with audio streaming? And how do we not let the core mission of a religious service get hijacked by the allure of technology? All good questions to ask before you flip the switch.
