Streaming for Churches Small to Large

Recently many churches have chosen to reach members remotely through live streaming. This means we need to figure out the most economical and budget-friendly ways to stream church services without breaking the bank and maybe with a lean or nonexistent technical staff. How can you create a high-quality viewing experience for your remote members? Read on to find out.

Start Small

Starting out using your phone or tablet and a computer within the church. This is a good start for a single-camera shoot. There is no need to spend a lot on a camera. This option allows small churches to gain experience before investing in additional hardware. Even with a small crew and no budget, most can make this option work.

Produce High-Quality Videos On-the-Fly

If you have an iOS device, iPad, or iPhone, you can try Wirecast Go, a powerful iOS application that allows you to use your phone’s camera to capture video, mix in graphics, and switch between prepared or live shots. It’s a switcher for your iPhone, and it’s completely free. 

The free version allows switching between two saved shots and easy live streaming to YouTube, with the ability to place and modify graphics. For just $5.99, you can unlock expanded streaming destination options, instant replay, and saving/switching between unlimited shots. So, if you’re a struggling church and don’t have the finances for a full production system but have an iOS device and want the power of Wirecast’s professional live-streaming software, you can get it for free or $5.99. 

Next Level Up

Use Wirecast Go, or take it up a notch with Wirecast: professional, powerful, flexible live streaming and video production software for Mac and Windows. New low-cost subscriptions for Wirecast Pro start as low as $35 per month. Add images, logos, and graphics, then stream live video to Youtube with just a couple of clicks. 

The newest version of Wirecast is much more efficient on your computer resources, letting you run full HD productions with machines that couldn’t have reliably handled it in the past. Full testing and results are in our blog post linked here. It’s also jam-packed with features and functionality to create high-quality live video streams easily and quickly. Getting started with top-of-the-line, professional broadcasting tools for less than fifty dollars is now a very realistic and affordable option for achieving high-quality production results, taking advantage of whatever you have at your disposal.

Going Bigger

Ok, now that we have options, maybe you have a $1000 budget. You’re not sure what you can do with that. You already have the computer, but you would like to do at least two cameras, but don’t want the expense of two cameras and would like to keep it under that $1000 budget. 

Remember that Wirecast Go application we talked about? How about that USB webcam for $30-$100? For a maximum of $106 for two cameras, plus a one-year subscription to Wirecast Pro prepaid for the year at $420 (which comes with top-tier support for the entire year, too), you come in under budget. Your pastor will be thrilled.

So, where does the third camera come in? You have the iPhone with Wirecast Go, the webcam… But your iPad over there is looking kind of lonely. That’s right; you purchased Wirecast Go under your account. Now you can install that on your iPad and have three cameras! How’s that for budget-friendly? You now can have the power of mixing in 3 cameras, graphics, recorded content, capturing scriptures, and song lyrics, all for under $1000.

Mega Churches

THE CHALLENGE: Now You Have Tons of Content, But How Do You Manage It?

With a prolific production of digital assets, including motion pictures, conference videos, and sermons footage sent in from various locations around the world, global religious organizations face increasing complexity in managing their digital content. Their rapidly growing number of rich media in multiple versions and formats. Also, many language tracks presented a need for a content management solution to organize and store the diverse production content efficiently and economically.
Telestream DIVA or Kumulate software suite delivers just the right solution.

THE SOLUTION: Streamlining Content Management with Telestream

DIVA and Kumulate system implementations provide the necessary on-premise content management across multiple sites and multi-lingual environments. Redefining and restructuring content management processes, which paves the way for seamless scaling up based on growing content creation, was achieved. 

  • Integration with editing systems to manage raw edit content
  • Integration with asset management systems to provide archive operations and access to global users
  • Complex storage management for movie productions
  • Handling of multi-lingual content, associating 90+ language files with the source video
  • Intelligent organization of all data, arranged by media type in data tape library
THE RESULTS: Intelligent and Flexible Rich Media Organization, Sharing and Storage

Through the implementation of Telestream’s Content Management, a large global religious organization has succeeded in not only getting a handle on managing big volumes of rich media but also setting themselves up for sustainable future growth in a cost-effective and intelligent manner. Key benefits include:

  • System flexibility. Built-in agility allows for efficient management and better control of a complex digital asset production environment spanning multiple global locations and multi-lingual content.
  • Automated and secure data migrations. Securing the digital content and preserving its integrity during data migrations is no longer a tedious task since the new technology is automating the process.
  • Intelligent asset management. Methodical and practical data organization of media by type results in a more streamlined rich media management, storage, and retrieval.

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