For a church technical leader, the most dreaded words in the English language may well be when your pastor says, “I was just on a (insert consumer live stream application here) and it worked so well with my webcam that it got me thinking that we should live stream the message.”
To your pastor it seems so simple; just turn on your laptop and fire up a web service that does live streaming (of a sort). Why wouldn't you do it?
People who don't “do tech” have all sorts of assumptions about live streaming. Starting with the wrong assumptions will take your church into a money pit of one problem after another. This article is intended to dispel the myths and bring clarity to what's actually needed for a good live stream.
So, what might you actually need for a live stream that your pastor may not know about?
All we need is a webcam. Right?
Is a webcam enough? Probably not. A webcam might work for someone sitting at a desk or conference room table, but it’s not going to provide the results you’re looking for in a larger venue. While professionals often do amazing things with camera phones and consumer camcorders, if your church doesn’t have highly trained professionals, they could be really surprised with what they get --- and not in a good way. .
Webcams are meant to be used close up. Despite what your pastor may assume, this means that you’ll get a wider lens, which will make a subject look very, very small. Most don’t even have true variable lenses, so if you can zoom, it’s digital and is really just making the pixels bigger.
They also lack manual controls, which means that dark areas may cause the image to either get grainy or slow down the shutter and make the image smear in a dreamlike fashion.
If your church does go with a camcorder to eliminate the problems of not having a zoom lens, you may still have the same problems as a web cam if you don’t make sure you can control the camera’s shutter, gain, aperture, focus, and white balance.
Camcorders are better than webcams, but when you zoom you’ll need to make sure you have a good tripod because zoom magnifies both the image and any motion that is transferred to the camera by the operator, or even by people walking near the camera.
What about lighting?
Unless your church already has theatrical lighting (and maybe even if you do), your pastor probably doesn’t know that overhead lights, unless balanced with lighting from the front, will produce shadows on the subject’s face, obscuring his or her eyes.
Without backlight, a black suit coat might blend into the background making your pastor look like a floating head.
If your sanctuary was built with a large window behind the stage or pulpit area, you could end up seeing only a silhouette that looks like someone in witness protection.
Your pastor may not know that windows and artificial light are different color temperatures and so the camera may show either very orange light or very blue light, depending on how it’s white balanced.
What may seem like a very evenly lit platform can show on camera as a mass of bright spots and dark holes. A pastor who walks around a lot may in one instant be too brightly lit and be too dark in the next.
Audio for video
What about your sound system? If your live sound engineer isn’t used to creating two mixes, one for the people present in the sanctuary and one for the live stream, sound could be another unforeseen problem area. Sound that’s mixed in a live venue takes ambient and stage volumes into account to form pleasant sound, but these are missing when you listen to that same mix remotely.
There’s also a problem with levels between different elements of the service that will manifest itself on a live stream. The volume of a song could easily be much louder than the person speaking immediately afterward. Unless your church plans for this, the people watching the live stream would be forced to turn their computer or mobile device down immediately when a song starts only to turn it all the way back up when someone prays or reads scripture after it ends.
Adding it to the list of duties of the sound engineer could be problematic, too. Imagine if the live stream has trouble during a worship song, do you want the sound engineer running off to make sure the internet is still working. What about having to make the decision between having a live stream or adding the extra instrument that the worship pastor added on the morning of your service? A much better solution is adding in a dedicated person to be responsible for mixing the stream.
Consider copyright ###?SUBHEAD###
If your church is planning including the worship (music) portion of your service, your pastor needs to consider the legal ramifications. In the US, churches enjoy an exemption for live performance of copyrighted works during a worship service. Many churches assume that this carries over to a live stream. It doesn't.
There are live streaming licenses from Christian Copyright Solutions, CCLI and others, but they cost money, so that immediately impacts the idea of “live streaming for free.” Even with the appropriate license, some live streaming hosts play it safe and choose not to (or make it difficult to…) stream copyrighted material.
Foregoing one of these licenses could land your church in court with high attorney's fees, even if you do win, and crippling damages if you don't.
The alternative is to start the live stream with the message only. But that yields another problem. The people watching online may not know when the sermon starts. Think about it. This week your 10am service may include four songs and announcements, so the message starts around 10:40am. Next week there may only be three songs and no announcements, so the pastor's message starts at 10:25am. Imagine the frustration of tuning into a television show that started somewhere in a 15-20 minute window, but it was impossible to know when from week to week.
Bits and bytes
What about bandwidth? In your pastor's office, on a weekday, 1 mbps up might be enough for a video chat. On a weekend, when the congregation is in the building, that speed quickly becomes too little to even do a SD live stream. Think about all the kids using the internet and the dad's checking the news or the sports scores.
Depending on your church's location, you may not even be able to get more bandwidth. Maybe DSL is your only choice or you're just outside of the cable company's new “faster internet speeds” area. Either way, if your church doesn't have 3-4 mbps up, for 720p (more for 1080p), you need to get it or settle for a lower quality stream.
An alternative is to lock down the church wifi so that it's only used for live streaming. If your congregation is accustomed to getting online with an unsecured network, you could get push back from them, especially if your church has spotty cell coverage.
Do we need an encoder? Yes, you do. Consumer services like the ones your pastor used don't require you to capture video and encode it with special hardware or software. That's all done with the webcam and in the browser. When you add a better camera, you've got to get the video into either a computer or encoding device.
If you're using a computer, there's a certain bare minimum speed for the connection and USB 2.0 won't do it. This rules out older computers that were donated to the church after their useful life was up, as well as many computers used for basic web browsing, word processing, and email.
Encoding is a rather processor-intensive process, too. Even if you can get the video into the machine with USB 3.0, thunderbolt, or PCI express, the computer has to be powerful enough to use the software to encode the video without dropping frames.
For small to medium churches, a better option might be an encoder box like the one manufactured by Teredek, called the Vidiu. This eliminates the need for a separate capture device and makes the process of encoding much simpler than with software. Chances are, you don't have one of those just lying around at your church. So you'll need to add that to the budget too.
What about hosting? There are a lot of ways you can go with this, but remember that your church will “pay” for it in some way. Maybe you won't have good support. Maybe a car commercial will interrupt your pastor's sermon on stewardship. Maybe you'll live under the constant threat of being taken down abruptly despite having the right copyright license. Maybe the solution won't work exactly right for your church, but you'll say, “It's better than nothing.”
If you can afford it, the best solution is often just to pay for a live streaming service. Some services are pay-as-you-go, so low viewership means a small bill, but the opposite is also true. Others are flat rate, so a busy week is just the same as a low week. There's no right solution for all churches.
People Power
How many people will it take to do it right? The answer is, “It depends.” Depending on how you do it, there's a cost in more people to run the live stream too. Someone needs to run the live stream equipment. Someone needs to troubleshoot it when it goes down. Someone needs to make sure you have a good shot (a director) and that the video is embedded on the website. These people are probably not included in the “turn on my laptop; it will be easy” plan that your pastor might have proposed.
Live streaming may look simple, but when you move it from a small office to a large room, it gets a lot harder to do well. Once you add in all the moving parts, a streaming ministry can take on a life of its own. This isn't to discourage you, but to help in “counting the cost” so you don't abandon a project that's larger than it looks on its surface.
When adding a live stream, don't settle for a system that “technically works,” but reflects poorly on your church.
