Whether your online streaming ministry is well established or in its infancy, the future is on your side. Recent advances in technology, including new encoding solutions and the growth of content distribution networks, can help you connect with your online congregation in ways never before possible. While challenges to success remain, thankfully, practical solutions to common problems are within reach of most laymen—and most church budgets.
Read on to discover how to clean up your video signal at its source, address bandwidth and speed challenges, and learn new ways of helping your congregants embrace online media as a path to meaningful worship.
A clear signal through the noise
Video must be compressed before it can be streamed. Whatever your solution for compression is, make sure you begin with the highest possible quality video shot in the best possible light.
This process begins with the camera. The first link in any streaming chain is the video source, the device used to capture the flow of moving images before it is compressed and streamed on the web. A common misconception among many houses of worship is that if the goal is to create an easy-to-transmit video (which usually translates into a low-resolution and low-bitrate video signal) for a web browser or mobile phone, then it's acceptable to use a low-quality camera.
The opposite is actually true; video signals captured by low-quality equipment tend to have a greater amount of “video noise,” much of it introduced by the camera itself. Video noise artifacts make it difficult to properly compress a video signal, and the unusable noise inevitably becomes compressed along with the true content. In a low-bitrate signal, the noise is a higher percentage of the total output, resulting in a much lower quality video signal overall than if the source signal had been captured cleanly, by a higher-end camera.
In addition to using the best possible camera to obtain an optimal signal, keep in mind that lighting plays an enormous role in the quality of compressed video. Video shot in low light has much more video noise than a well-lit video. Be careful; low-light video can look clean and sharp when viewed on a monitor connected directly to a camera, but completely lose its luster when compressed for streaming.
FIRST RULE OF THUMB WHEN STREAMING: DON’T COMPETE WITH YOUR CONGREGATION FOR BANDWIDTH.
A multitude of sins can be covered by a high-end (and correspondingly high-priced) encoding system—these usually have video processing capabilities that can do a lot to help “clean up” the less-than-ideal video sources to create a sharp video signal. But the quality we aspire to always begins with a good source.
Beating the bandwidth challenge
First rule of thumb when streaming: don't compete with your congregation for bandwidth. If you provide free wireless Internet on-site for your members to access email, browse the web, and perform other tasks, or if you use telephones that connect over the Internet rather than copper wire, you should strongly consider obtaining a separate Internet connection for your streaming video. Sharing an Internet connection between the outgoing stream and other tasks can result in unexpected signal drops as the various connected devices vie for bandwidth. A dedicated line for your streaming service ensures that the outgoing live cast won't be affected.
The act of streaming to a growing online congregation will likely require the help of a content distribution network (CDN). A common problem among growing houses of worship is the ability to properly scale their bandwidth to accommodate everyone who desires to partake in the worship service. If your ministry is streaming to a few remote locations, such as a satellite chapel or a sister campus, you can get away with using an in-house distribution server—think Skype or Slingbox, or a similar point-to-point solution. If, on the other hand, your service streams to a large, distributed flock, your point-to-point solution won't be able to reach everyone.
Basic math will help explain this concept: when using an in-house streaming server, the amount of Internet bandwidth necessary to send a streaming signal to multiple viewers boils down to the sum of all the individual viewing bandwidths. An Internet speed of one megabit is more than sufficient to stream an HD movie to a single viewer, but you have one thousand viewers, then the total bandwidth demand is one thousand megabits—much, much faster than the speed of most Internet connections, even in our day and age.
Because it can be difficult to predict exactly how many viewers will be tuning in, both your bandwidth and network must be capable of expanding and contracting on the fly. In addition, depending on the streaming setup, sending video to a variety of devices (computer, tablet, mobile, etc.) requires the content to be stored in multiple formats and sizes to match those devices. Commercial services such as Netflix and Hulu defeat this challenge by sheer brute force: they create and store a separate version of each video for every single manufacturer's device that their service can possibly play on, from
individual brands and sizes of tablet computers to set-top boxes, game consoles, desktop computers, laptops, and the cornucopia of connected phones running different software.
Using a professional CDN will deal with most—potentially all— of these problems.
A content distribution network service provider has the professional expertise and the online infrastructure to scale your streaming ministry to a virtually unlimited number of viewers. Churches that use this type of service only need to send a single stream to their CDN over their outgoing Internet connection; the CDN effectively copies the stream for each viewer on the other end of the network. Because CDN service providers have access to vast amounts of bandwidth, they can deliver your streaming signal cleanly and smoothly to any number of online viewers. Many CDNs even provide the software application used by the viewer to watch the service on their personal device. By using a CDN, you leverage a powerful, invisible tool capable of delivering the Gospel to a global flock.
A final word on speed: when shopping for an Internet connection for your church, be very careful to distinguish the upload speed of the connection from the download speed. The faster the upload, the better your streaming will reach and serve your congregation. Typically, Internet service providers promote their service by touting a very high download speed—and unless you are dealing with 100%, end-to-end fiber optic connections, the upload speed will usually be less than one tenth as fast as your download speed. Find out the sustainable upload speed, and then allow for overhead beyond what your video itself will require. If your video is a blazing-fast, HD-quality live stream of 1.2 Mbps, a 1.2 Mbps upload speed will not be enough to carry it—aim for at least a 2.0 Mbps connection.
A glimpse into the near future
But what about the bandwidth issues on the far end of the stream? Churches have little or no control over the multitude of devices and bandwidth speeds used by their viewers. Whether your worship service is viewed by a subway commuter on a cellphone in 480i resolution or streamed to a 4K-resolution television in a home, the major challenge to delivering video content is still having sufficient bandwidth.
Thankfully, new codecs—video compression technologies—are arriving this year. Announced at this year's Consumer Electronics Show, VP9 (a free Google technology) and HEVC (High Efficiency Video Coding, also known as H.265) both help reduce the bandwidth needed to stream video content by over 50% as compared to the current VP8 and H.264 codecs. Most notably, the new codecs will allow existing devices to play both new and old video content at much higher quality over connections with lower bandwidth.
