Where to start will depend largely on what you have, your budget, and what you are trying to achieve. If you are thinking about making this a long term addition to your ministry then you may also need to consider a longer-term strategy before you race out and buy whatever is left on the shelf.
Below are all of our Frequently asked questions relating to setup issues, but we are also planning on publishing some “setup Guides” that will suit a few different scenarios.
If you have a question that is not answered here, then please get in touch and we will not only help you sort it out, we will update this page here too to help others.
how do I make my livestream more interactive?
- Be careful not to make church so different that it becomes something else entirely. Remember that we will come back to a stage where we will be able to do church again the way we used to.
- Try to keep church about fellow congregation members fellow shipping together, and not just the parish members watching the staff do church.
- Interaction is important as it will help to prevent church online from becoming purely entertainment.
- Try to keep as many elements as possible that are part of your church identity. The character of your church is what it is because of these elements and maintaining them if at all possible will help to maintain a sense of community.
- There will be some things that you do as church that will be public and some that will be more private. These lines were probably a bit more blurred previously. Now they need to be a bit clearer. Don’t forget that some of the people watching you stream may have never attended your church.
- Do a live cross to skype or zoom – and interview a congregation member
- Ask members to text in questions about the sermon
- Pre-record testimonials from members and play the recording back as a segment during the livestream
- Have multiple people doing different parts of the service.
- Encourage commenting on the live-streaming platform and spend time responding afterwards.
Should I stream live or pre-record my services?
Every church is different and you need to consider what gear you have, what skills you have and also how you want your congregation to experience the new church environment.
What is really important from a ministry perspective is that you members can still engage and interact with the staff and other congregation members.
Live-streaming does lend itself to be interactive, but only if you make it interactive, and whilst pre-recorded services may not sound very interactive, they can be if you do it right.
I will write up “how do I make my pre-recorded service more interactive?” and also “how do I make my livestream more interactive?”
From a “production” perspective, the main difference will be the amount of time spent by all the people involved, and the times at which that work needs to be done.
If you are pre-recording various sections of the service and then stitching them together afterwards, then there will be a lot of “post edit” time spent bringing all of the recorded parts together. However you do have some flexibility as to when you do that work. It does also allow you to re-use common parts of a service.
If you are going down the livestream route, then all of your “production” will be done in real time and you need to do that work at the time you want your livestream to be “live”. You will still need some prep time and you may still use some pre-recorded content.
For example, in my own church we are streaming live. It means that there are 5 or 6 of us at the church each week. We are streaming one weekly service to replace our original 5 congregations. Most of the service elements are done live, but we will play pre-recorded music (that we have permission for) at the end and we have also pre-recorded a baptism that will be “replayed” onto the livestream. To encourage interaction we are continuing our normal tradition of having a question time after the sermon. This allows people to text in questions to a “pre-paid” mobile which are then asked live by one of the staff and the preacher answers them. This was a fairly easy transition of something that was traditional for us, into the online world which helps to keep us true to who we are as a church.
I know others though, that pre-record their whole service, and then they make it available at a specific time each week, the staff are all active on the social media platforms and ready to interact. This concept of pre-recording frees up the staff to make them available to be more interactive.
How do I stream to Youtube Live?
There are multiple ways to stream to Youtube, but here I will quickly explain the minimum gear needed to get going.
You will need the following gear:
- A camera – Preferably on a tripod
- A computer – The more powerful the better but many are using Mac-books that are up to 8 years old.
- A streaming program like OBS
- A Video Capture device – That is compatible with your computer (examples here)
- A solid Internet connection
- A microphone that can connect to your camera, or a microphone and a small mix desk
- If you are using a small mix desk you will need an Audio Inserter
You will also need to create a Youtube channel for your church if you do not have one already.
You will also need to enable live-streaming which could take up to 24 hours
Once your channel is ready, you will need to create a new livestream from the live control room.
You are wanting to get the “Stream Key” which will need to be set into OBS
Go to OBS and Settings and select Streaming from the left-hand menu
Select Youtube from the list and paste in your “Stream Key”
Save the settings and then you should be able to go live.
Our video tutorials page has videos on how to setup OBS and a BlackMagic UltraStudio Mini Recorder, and how to stream to various platforms.
There is a lot of specific OBS help on their website here : https://obsproject.com/wiki/
And Youtube has a guide to starting out here : https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2474026?hl=en
But you can always call us for support and to talk about what gear you may need.
Where do I live-stream to?
There are quite a few places that you can live-stream your church services to.
Amongst our customers here, the most common ones would be:
- Youtube Live
- Facebook Live
- LiveStream
But you will need to consider your congregation, and how public you want your services to be.
I would encourage most churches to be as public as they can be, but many churches do have member only content normally integrated into their weekly services so you may need to consider some changes to your service to make the live-stream part public and keep the member-only segments in another platform like Zoom.
If you want to keep your live-streams private for members only then you can do that but the effort is a LOT greater and it will be a lot harder for your members (especially those that are not used to online social platforms) to connect and access your services.
How do i get sound into my stream?
There are a few ways to do this and the way you have your gear setup may require one method over another. However, one of the ways that work in almost any situation is to use an audio embedder. This will insert audio from your sound desk into the HDMI signal path of your camera. This allows you to use the sound desk capabilities, and replaced the camera mics. Read more about the Audio embedder here.