Streaming Strategies: Streaming to individuals vs. Multi-site

×

Expand

Some churches record the sermon in one location and transport it, either physically or online to satellite locations. This can be cost effective, but live (or “almost live”) is much better for certain events, like sporting events, news, and of course, church. So, your church will, at some point, be exploring live streaming to satellite campuses.

There are things to consider before you do so, though.

When you're live streaming to individuals, losing the stream might be par for the course. You can't control the fact that one person chooses to watch the live stream while riding in a car and loses the cell signal. Maybe another has dodgy internet service. Perhaps another is using an unsupported browser.

Those are things you can't control.

On your end, you can have multiple encoders, redundant ISPs, and even a plan for bypassing the switcher should it go down, but what about at the remote location?

How do you plan for and live stream to one or more satellite locations? Do you just use the same strategy that you'd use for reaching individuals on your online campus? If not, what should you do differently?

When you're live streaming to a remote campus, you should take into account the problems that arise should any component in the chain fail.

Even when everything is running perfectly, there's the problem of time. Even if you have two identical worship services happening, they won't be completely in-sync all the time. That means the message might start early or late from the remote campus's perspective. That's something you need to take into account.

So, how do you solve these problems?

Start by examining each step of the live streaming chain and looking for vulnerabilities. You capture the image through one or more cameras, send the signal to a switcher, then out of the switcher and into the encoder. That signal is sent through your ISP to the live streaming host on the internet, which distributes it to the viewer through their ISP to their device.

With a remote campus, you have more control of the entire technological infrastructure. That means you can do everything right at the origin; but if the ISP at the remote location has issues, the projector lamp quits working, or anything else knocks out the signal, a group of people are will be unable to engage with the sermon.

So, what is your plan for this eventuality?

On the originating end, you can have redundant gear or plans to route around gear that's not absolutely necessary, but is too expensive to duplicate, like the switcher. Consider a similar plan for the receiving end.

In a perfect world, where money isn't an issue, everything that is integral to the delivery of the livestream would have a duplicate. Each of these pieces of the puzzle would be as simple to swap with its twin as a press of a button. For most churches, this approach isn't an option.

Perhaps, you can't get a back-up internet connection that's as good as the primary one. However, isn't a 1mbps connection that can deliver SD video better than none at all? Maybe you can't have a back-up projector that's as good at the normal one, but since people are depending on it, isn't it better to have a spare that you could swap out in a few minutes? What about the receiving device? Maybe your normal plan is a high-end computer or other device. Maybe an AppleTV or Roku is your back up.

You still want to test all your back ups on a regular basis and have a plan for quickly swapping pieces. Maybe that's easier said than done, given the nature of the “this-will-do-in-a-pinch” kind of pieces. Still, you should plan and train for it.

Since we're talking about the public internet, we know that it's possible to transmit data half way around the world with no problems, but something causes latency, buffering, packet loss, etc. prevents it from getting to the other side of town.

Wouldn't it be great if we had the gear to help smooth out these types of problems as well?

Good news. There is. As you might expect, they come with a cost.

Neither of these or other solutions are good for the church that can just barely afford to pay for a live stream meant for residential use. However, when you're building a system designed to insure live video makes it from one location to another every time you want it to, you don't do it with a $5 adapter or a $10 service. But when you think of the cost divided between all the people at the remote campus versus what it would be like for them to show up at church only to be disappointed that there's no video sermon, it's not that costly. Many of them simply won't come back.

Here are a few options for reduncancy. The reason they can be costly is that these solutions rely on upcoming technologies that aren't mainstream quite yet. Economies of scale have not yet brought down the price.

With 4K coming up on the horizon, a new video codec is starting to make its way into certain devices and software. HEVC (aka H.265) allow for the transmission of video signals at much lower bit rates. That's good for 4K, but it's also useful for HD. By using hardware that encodes using HEVC, you can send the same quality of video at a 62% (according to this article on Wikipedia: ) reduction in average bit rate.

In practice, this could mean that 1080p live stream encoded at 6,000 Kbps bit rate using H.264 (which is on the high end for 1080p 30 fps according to Google's support documents for YouTube: ) could be sent at 2,280 Kbps using HEVC with no perceived loss in quality.

Devices from providers like StreamMonkey and Living as One use this codec to make sure that you get the same quality, even when the internet connection slows down at either site.

To further combat problems, StreamMonkey uses a service called Zixi, integrated into the ViTec Ace encoders and decoders, which insures delivery with up to 40% packet loss.

The Living as One solution uses a different process, receiving the signal from the transmission site and recording it in a buffer so that the congregation at the remote site is actually watching “almost live.” Whether this is achieved by adding an additional song in the worship segment of the service or starting later (e.g. 11:30 for the remote campus and 11:00 for the original one), this means that not only does the live stream have a little extra time to get to the destination, but it also means that the message can start precisely when it's called for by the order of the service, never being early or late.

That's not to say that StreamMonkey and others don't have DVR solutions, but that Living as One has it built into their hardware specifically to minimize network problems.

Some latency is to be expected, even with live streams, but as long as it's not two-way video communication, most people won't notice.

“Almost live” does have it's own set of problems, though.

Don't be dishonest about the video coming from one campus to another, claiming it's live at both 11:00 and 11:30, but you just use the later one. “Almost live” is a pragmatic choice that helps solve network and time delay problems. Anticipate and address problems that a longer delay will cause for people from the remote campus. They may watch late at home or on the road because they're used to church starting later than it does at the original campus. That also goes for when they visit the original campus. You don't want people feeling like you fooled them. Just be honest.

We live in an exciting time when one church can meet in multiple locations using technology to spread the Word of God. While there are challenges to be overcome, doing so is worth the cost and trouble. The people your church impacts are the return on the investment of doing so. They'll be impacted long after you solve the problems of live streaming to other campuses.