4 Tech Tips Made Easy for Live Streaming Church Services
Your last church service live stream left much to be desired. Between muffled audio and choppy, inaccurate subtitles, many remote listening congregants missed the message entirely. Others were treated to a helping of grainy video with a side of buffering. Still others found that the footage would not load at all.
This can be disappointing to hear when so much love and energy was poured into the service itself. And knowing that your remote congregants are just as valuable as your in-person ones, you want them to have an equally powerful experience. Thankfully, live streaming church services at high-quality is more accessible and affordable than you think, and you don’t have to be a technology expert to take advantage of it.
Table of Contents
1. Record At the Correct Bitrate
One of the biggest misconceptions when it comes to recording video is that the higher the bitrate the higher the video quality. This is not strictly true, and, in fact, recording at too high a video bitrate will negatively impact the playback experience.
Understanding Video Bitrate
Part of this misconception stems from the confusion between video bitrate and speed. After all, your networks’ bandwidth is also measured in bits per second (bps). However, this bps measurement is not the same as the bits per second at which you’ve chosen to record your video.
When it comes to your video, bps refers to the “richness” of the video. Even before the video is sent, it tells you at what speed (network bitrate) the files should stream at in order to maintain quality. Therefore, higher video bitrates directly translate to a need for more bandwidth to stream effectively.
On the other hand, too low a bitrate means low video quality. Your goal is to balance the two, recording decently high-quality video that’s not so large your audience can’t reliably stream it.
What Video Bitrate Should You Choose?
Record your video bitrate somewhere between 3500 and 5000kbps (kilobits per second). Pair this with a video resolution of 720p (pixels) and 30fps (frames per second). If you want higher quality resolution and think your viewers’ bandwidth can handle it, consider 4500-6000kbps paired with 1080p and 60fps.
2. Simulcast Your Service Across Platforms
Why live stream your church service to a single location when you can stream across multiple websites simultaneously? Imagine sending your live stream to YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, your website, and more all at the same time.
The Spirit Behind Simulcasting
Look up simulcasting and you’ll see it listed alongside multistreaming, multicasting, and multi-destination streaming. Sometimes these terms are used interchangeably and sometimes they refer to subtle differences in the streaming workflow. However, the end result is the same: you make your live stream visible in multiple places at once.
This is somehow both easier and harder than it sounds. Many destinations have their own requirements and best practices for the bitrate and resolution of incoming video streams. Therefore, your chosen bitrate (see above) may not be optimal for all of your chosen destinations. That’s where transcoding comes in.
If you’ve already packaged (encoded) your video files with certain specs, you can repackage (transcode) those video files with new specs for delivery to different destinations. This is as easy as finding the right media server to handle the job for you.
Benefits of Simulcasting
Why go to all the trouble when your congregants can easily just access the stream on your website? Simulcasting across social media platforms (or other websites) increases discoverability and accessibility. New viewers may find you when browsing Facebook, for example, and convert to loyal audience members from there.
You also have to ask yourself if your website is optimized for mobile viewing, as many of your viewers may be accessing the stream from a smartphone. Social media apps are already smartphone friendly and can handle that part for you, making it easier for your digital congregation to find you anytime, anywhere.
At a time when many are wondering if we are becoming too disconnected, communities that embrace this new landscape are thriving more than ever before.
3. Use Adaptive Bitrate Streaming to Maximize Quality
Transcoding through a media server can do more than just simulcast your stream. It can also help you optimize your stream for each individual viewer. What’s more, it can do it dynamically in response to individual user bandwidth limitations.
ABR Behind the Scenes
Adaptive bitrate streaming (ABR) is a method by which a media server transcodes live video streams in response to data it receives from individual viewers. It’s based on the principal that regardless of the strength of your streaming infrastructure, a viewer’s experience is still at the mercy of their personal network capabilities. Put simply, even the most advanced video streaming platforms will buffer and fail if the viewer’s network can’t handle it.
Put simply, the media server pings the user’s device to determine bandwidth availability and sends live video at an appropriate bitrate. However, it doesn’t stop there. It continuously gets information from the user’s device, detecting bandwidth fluctuations and adjusting the video stream in real time.
The Viewer’s Experience
While this may sound complicated on the backend, the user experience is, quite simply, optimized video quality. Note that we said optimized and not perfect. If you’ve ever streamed a video and saw the resolution degrade for a few moments, it’s possible you were watching ABR in action. However, the culprit was not the streaming platform but your own network. That said, it’s still preferable to buffering or freezing. ABR delivers the live stream at the highest possible quality without risking those delays.
4. Stream in Real-Time to Support Interactivity
Make your live steams more dynamic with real-time chats or follow them up with small group video discussions. Interactivity is the key to engagement. However, for it to be truly effective, you need the technology to support it.
Real Time vs. Live Video
Aren’t you already streaming in real time if you are streaming?? The truth is, live streaming isn’t perfectly live. The process of packaging, delivering, and unpackaging live video streams takes time, and many streams result in as much as 30 seconds of latency (delay).
Real-time streaming refers to low-latency (a few seconds) or ultra-low-latency (sub-second) streaming. These streams are uniquely fast, which makes scalability challenging, as in the case of WebRTC, a famously speedy streaming technology that hit the market several years back. Now, many streaming platform providers are worked to harness the power of WebRTC in a way that’s both more scalable and more secure.
When Real-Time Delivery Matters
Real-time delivery may not always be a priority. For straight-forward live streams, it likely doesn’t matter much if your remote congregation is seeing the service at a delay, as long as the stream itself is smooth. However, it can make all the difference when it comes to interactive components, like live chats, polls, and two-way interactive video. Where interactivity is concerned, real-time delivery is paramount and will make or break the efficacy of these components.
How To Take Advantage of These Tips
The first choice you need to make is also the last one.
What do we mean by this? You don’t need to reinvent the wheel or hire an IT team to accomplish professional level live streaming of church services using some of or all the tips above. All you need is an affordable streaming media platform provider that can handle the technical aspects, so you can focus on creating powerful experiences for your congregation. Learn more about what you should look for in a streaming platform provider.