You have seen other churches streaming their services live. How do they do it, and where to start?
You will need some equipment and people to do the job. Please use this list as a general idea and not as a hard recommendation, since technology changes quickly and it is difficult to recommend specific items that work. You may find a good combination of various products, and sometimes you may already own some.
1. First you need one or more video cameras. Shop at your local electronic store or online to compare various video cameras, their features and prices.
2. Audio / Video mixer equipment. This is very helpful, if you want to record video from multiple cameras and adjust audio volume levels.
2a. Your DVD recorder for long-term video storage can be connected to the video mixer output (not shown on the diagram).
3. Live video encoding client application will be installed on the studio computer. This computer will receive signal from the mixer. To get the video feed to the computer you may use FireWire (IEEE 1394) input, or use a variety of the video capture cards. Video capture cards come in different flavors and usually support analog or s-video inputs and provide USB connectivity to a computer. Video encoding applications such as WireCast will accept the video signal and publish it to the streaming service.
4. Streaming service, such as provided by “Church Video Streaming” site, will receive the video feed from the studio and will make it available to various web clients. Connectivity between church video studio and video streaming hosting need to support desired video quality. Please check with your Internet provider supported upload speed, usually this is a lower number that is given by an Internet provider. Internet speed of 12Mbit down and 2Mbit up will allow uploading of the video stream with a bit rate close to 2Mbit.
For practical decision on video quality and speed, you need to consider not only the upload speed maximums, but also your target audience. Some of your church members or viewers may only have basic DSL service or mobile broadband connection, that will not allow receiving high speed/quality videos. Our recommendation is to cap video quality around 500Kbit. Please see our video quality comparison page.
churchvideostreaming
com