Unsplash.com; Caspar Rubin
Three of the biggest companies in the online world have free live-streaming options. You probably know about Facebook and YouTube, but what’s the third? Twitch. Twitch used to be its own animal, created as an off-shoot of justin.tv, which itself started as a life-streaming experiment. In August of 2014, they were bought by Amazon.
As you might expect, there’s no clear winner of the three. Each has pluses and minuses. So you really need to start with what you want and then pick the platform that best suits your needs. And keep in mind, that although this article is about these three free options, a paid live-streaming host might be a better choice for your church if the minuses make live-streaming with one of these three problematic.
YouTube
Let’s start with YouTube. While Facebook has gotten a lot of attention lately, YouTube offers some distinct advantages. Let’s consider audience first.
YouTube doesn’t have a newsfeed or pages or groups. All it has is video. Sure, there are channels and playlists, but they’re just a collection of videos. Even the discussions on YouTube are centered around videos.
So, it should come as no surprise that YouTube wants you to watch videos. In fact, they don’t care (for the most part) which videos you watch as long as you stay on YouTube to watch them.
With that said, newer videos tend to be more relevant to questions being asked, so YouTube tends to promote those. Since nothing is newer than live, anyone searching on YouTube (or Google for that matter) is likely to get some live, or recently live videos as part of the search.
That means that YouTube is good at showing videos to people who might be interested in them, but who have no prior relationship whatsoever with the creator.
That means that YouTube is good at showing videos to people who might be interested in them, but who have no prior relationship whatsoever with the creator.
This doesn’t come without a downside, though. Since Google is so huge and has such deep pockets, they’re a target for lawsuits. To combat this, Google created the contentID system for YouTube.
In negotiating with copyright owners, like record companies, they have created a system which enables their copyrighted works to be used or not and monetized or not. For most people, this system works fine. The problem comes when your church has permission, via the CCLI live-streaming license or the Christian Copyright Solutions’ license, to live stream copyrighted worship music, but YouTube doesn’t have a way to know that … or anyone to tell.
It’s possible to be totally legal in your interactions with YouTube, but have them act like you’re someone trying to get notoriety off of famous music … when you’re not.
Facebook is the other option that most people think about when it comes to free live streaming.
Once your church tries it, it’s easy to get hooked on what appear to be larger engagement numbers.
Unlike YouTube, though, don’t think that live steaming is an effective outreach tool on Facebook. All it takes is a cursory view of your newsfeed to know that’s the case.
Unlike YouTube, though, don’t think that live steaming is an effective outreach tool on Facebook. All it takes is a cursory view of your newsfeed to know that’s the case. Take a moment, if you doubt, and scroll down the newsfeed looking for live streams that you have no connection to.
Find one? I bet it was shared or created by a friend. No, I’m talking about a live stream that you might be interested in because you’re interested in the subject, not one where your connection is friendship-based.
While you might think that you can use the “six degrees of Kevin Bacon strategy” to reach your community (someone at your church has a friend who has a friend who has a friend and so on, until you reach everyone in your local community), in practice, it doesn’t work that way. Sure, your live video COULD go viral, but it probably won’t.
That’s the limitation of Facebook. Live streaming works great for people who are on Facebook and who have liked your page. In fact, it’s probably one of the best ways to reach those people … but most of the people who have liked your page are probably people who go to your church. Guess who is, presumably, not looking at Facebook during the time that you’re live streaming. That’s right, the people who go to your church … because they can see it in person.
To combat this, you could do a live stream during the week, after supper-time, and see if you can get your people to share that or make sure they share the recording of the live stream after church, but you’re still only going to get one or two degrees of separation at best, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg of people you could reach in your community.
Twitch
That brings us to the underdog in this fight—Twitch. You might not have considered it a contender because of it’s emphasis on gaming. While that’s true, they’ve expanded to include more genres as well.
The first of these was a creative community. It launched in 2015 by streaming old episodes of Bob Ross’s “The Joy of Painting.” Now, it includes categories on Game Development, Food, Cosplay, Comics, Automotive, Comedy, and much more. While your church could add to this channel with work from your own artists and craftspeople, there’s another section on Twitch that you might want to look into—IRL.
IRL is a mishmash of all sorts of live streams that don’t quite fit into either “gaming” or “creative” categories. Here’s a sample of the ones you might find: “Watching YouTube videos,” “Solving a 9x9 Rubix Cube,” and “African Cichlids” (yes, fish just swimming in an aquarium).
IRL on Twitch could just as easily be called “Everything else” so this is a real opportunity for some, but there are a couple of downsides.
Another problem is that videos are archived for only 14 days by default or 60 days for partners, prime users, etc. So, if you think you’ll be getting views in six months on a live stream you do today, you’re wrong.
First, it’s all just kind of thrown together in there. If you do a search, you may or may not find what you’re looking for. If, for example, you search for “church,” you won’t come across any results for churches, just gamers who use “church” as part of their gamer tags/handles. Another problem is that videos are archived for only 14 days by default or 60 days for partners, prime users, etc. So, if you think you’ll be getting views in six months on a live stream you do today, you’re wrong. It doesn’t look like Twitch has the problems with copyright policing that others like YouTube (and sometimes Facebook) do. That’s not to say they won’t in the future or that you should ignore your responsibility to have the appropriate licenses in place. You shouldn’t; please follow the law and treat copyright owners with respect.
With all this, you might wonder if any churches are currently using Twitch. The answer is yes. Perhaps there are more, but a quick search found one traditional church which didn’t seem to be getting any views whatsoever and a live stream that’s geared directly to gamers (https://www.twitch.tv/godsquadchurch).
It must be working because in addition to their normal Saturday live stream (which includes worship, prayer, and a sermon), God squad church recently had an in-person event called “SquadCon 2018” where they connected, and had both a gaming tournament and baptisms.
Closing thoughts
So, which of these platforms is right for you? It depends. If you’re trying to reach out past the people your church is already connected to, maybe YouTube fits the bill. If you want a place where your in-person congregation can easily watch when they’re sick or out of town, Facebook might be what you’re looking for. If you you have a thriving creative or gaming community or have a heart for people in those groups, maybe Twitch is right for you.
None of them are perfect and they all have limitations, but these three live-streaming services do illustrate what’s possible and the things to look out for in your live-streaming ministry. So do what works in your context to expand your ministry.
