Will you take down a big fire with a garden hose? Hardly… Lets hope that a fire hydrant is near to help with that task. This comparison between garden hose and a fire hydrant is a good illustration of the network throughput or network speed required to stream live video from your church. If you only have a handful of viewers, Internet connection that you have at your church may be sufficient to broadcast your church service to them. As your viewers number increase, that Internet connection at your church may no longer be sufficient.

First, lets understand some numbers. When you subscribe for Internet service you are usually given two numbers such as 12 Megabit a second download speed and 1.5 Megabit a second upload speed. The emphasis is usually given to a larger number such as 12 Megabit a second. This is the download speed, or the maxim speed with which you will receive the data, such as web page downloads, file downloads, or viewing videos from YouTube.

Another, usually smaller number, that is identified as upload speed indicates the maximum speed to transmit the data from your computer to the Internet. Live video streaming from your church falls into this category. Streaming videos to your viewers will be a process of uploading the data. How many viewers your church can support depends on the upload speed and the quality of the video stream. If the quality of the video stream is 500 Kilobit a second, then only 3 viewers can be connected to your church video broadcast. 1500/500=3.

What if the number of viewers is 30, 50 or maybe 300? A bigger pipe is needed, just like a fire hydrant. Church video streaming offers a solution of re-streaming your church video broadcast. Only a single connection will be established from your church computer to a server that has a lot more bandwidth to support growing number of viewers. Our lowest plan provides a speed of 10 Megabit a second, which can be increased to 100 and even 1000 Megabit a second.