With the widespread adoption of the internet and an increasing trend towards live streaming, many non-conventional organizations have jumped on the bandwagon to reach their target audience effectively. Churches top the list, benefitting immensely from live-streaming their religious workshops and ceremonies. It’s the new front porch in the churches’ settings.
Interestingly, churches are not new to media coverage. They have always been at the forefront of broadcasting on television. However, church services are only rarely available on mainstream television channels, which is why it is not so easy to tune in to live church transmissions. Today, with live streaming, churches can broadcast their services in real-time and reap several benefits. And this is one of the prime reasons why churches have stood the test of time.
In this Article:
⛪ Top 3 Benefits of Church Live Streaming
🕇 Increased Outreach: Breaking Through Physical Barriers
Significantly magnified outreach across geographic barriers remains the most prominent benefit of live streaming. At the same time, churches can reach out to the chronically sick and homebound community members through live streaming. That said, they can also conveniently connect with members who have to travel frequently, are away for vacation, or are enrolled at distant colleges and universities. And most importantly, given the social distancing directives during the current pandemic situation, live streaming facilitates a smooth and seamless flow of church services online.
Interestingly, it has become practically possible with the OTT technology to live stream directly from the church’s website. This is a significant achievement as it significantly magnifies the churches’ outreach when they multi-stream on social media channels and their websites. While it becomes effortless to tune into a virtual service, it becomes equally easy to maintain a sense of community and belonging, even when the worshippers cannot be physically together.
Hence, praying and worshipping become virtually possible from anywhere and everywhere. Capitalizing upon the internet’s power to expand their reach exponentially, live streaming allows the churches to deploy ultra-compatible, all-device video players to maximize the outreach. Moreover, since most people prefer to be alone while worshipping, tuning into catholic church services online becomes even more valuable.
🕇 Improved Engagement and Community Building
Not to forget, live streaming videos are perhaps the most effective mechanism to get your message across. Reports suggest that people tend to retain 89% of what they watch compared to only 10% of what they read. Hence, live streaming of church services plays a lead role in maximizing religious messages’ engagement, acting as an effective worship and teaching tool. Moreover, these video messages can easily be shared. Statistics suggest that 92% of people share the videos that they watch on their mobiles.
That said, live streaming also allows the attendees to ask questions in real-time and get responses in real time. They can type their queries in the comments and seek answers from the mentors within a moment or two. Moreover, there is an added sense of sharing and belongingness when the churches regularly engage with people through live events. Sharing experiences and concerns creates a strong bond between people.
🕇 Easy Fundraising
You might wonder how churches prompt the attendees to offer donations during the live sessions! Collecting donations is way easier and more reliable in an online setting than in the conventional physical environment. According to recent reports, over $2.2 billion worth of donations were made in a single year through online transfers. The underlying reason remains that people feel more secure and comfortable in making online payments.
Read More: Top 10 Virtual Fundraising Ideas
🏫 Live Stream Church Services with OneStream Live
✝️ Create Professional Streams with OneStream Studio
You can create professional live streams for your church sessions using OneStream Studio. You can add your church’s logo to brand your live sessions and use creative overlays such as backgrounds, banners, and tickers to enhance the visual appeal. You can even add countdown timers, intros and outros to make the beginnings and endings attractive or use intervals to mark breaks. Interestingly, you can respond to all incoming comments and messages from all social platforms using a single window – Live Unified Chat. To make things easier, you can add team members to help you streamline your content.
✅ Invite guests to your live broadcasts
✅ Brand your live sessions using your church logo and other creative overlays
✅ Add intros, outros and intervals
✅ Enjoy cross-platform chat
✅ Share screen and media
Read More: Introducing OneStream Studio
✝️ Go Live in Real-Time using RTMP Source Streaming
OneStream Live allows easy integration with several third-party tools to help you go live to any RTMP destination. For example, if you want to broadcast your prayer sessions on Telegram, you can use any of the reliable RTMP streaming tools such as OBS, Zoom, Wirecast, XSPlit, Ecamm, Be.Live, Restream, Melon or Streamyard, and go live on Telegram in no time.
✅ Social media live streaming
✅ Web live streaming using Embed Player
✅ Real-time multistreaming
✅ Unified Live Chat
✅ Event scheduling
✝️ Create Playlists for Pre-Recorded Video Streaming
Just in case your church does not want to invest in acquiring the required gear and equipment for live-streaming, or you are too busy to handle the relevant workload, OneStream Live offers a commendably handy feature: Pre-Recorded Live Videos. Using this feature, churches can pre-record their session and broadcast it anytime as an ongoing live session. This way, the churches can even create a replay of their previous services to make sure people who missed it can rejoin in spirit. Interestingly, OneStream Live also allows you to queue your pre-recorded videos into a playlist and schedule it for live streaming at the desired date and time. It’s relatively easy and straightforward.
✅ Upload pre-recorded videos
✅ Queue them in your desired order
✅ Schedule your stream (can be scheduled up to 60 days in advance)
🙏 Create your Church’s Webpage for Web Live Streaming
With OneStream Live’s Hosted Live Pages, you can create a dedicated webpage for your church and live stream your prayer sessions there. You can customize built-in templates and create the webpage according to your requirements using variations of font, colors, and backgrounds. To drive social engagement, you can add your social platforms links and even add a call-to-action to drive viewers to your desired destination. This can be a feedback form, your church merchandise store, your donation account, or anything you want. What is even more interesting is that you do not need to spend extra dollars to buy expensive domains or hosting services; Hosted Live Pages take care of that.
✅ Safe and secure streaming
✅ Custom domain in the name of your church
✅ Protect your exclusive church content
✅ No external hosting required
✅ Live cross-platform chat with viewers
✅ Track your analytics using Google Analytics, Meta Pixel, or Hotjar Site
🤲🏻 Final Call
Without a doubt, live streaming has evolved as a highly effective tool to engage with religious communities. A robust and powerful tool like OneStream Live can take the lead in facilitating churches for both real-time broadcasting and scheduling pre-recorded streams across over 45+ social media platforms and the church website simultaneously.
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OneStream Live is a cloud-based live streaming solution to create, schedule, and multistream professional-looking live streams across 45+ social media platforms and the web simultaneously. For content-related queries and feedback, write to us at [email protected]. You’re also welcome to Write for Us!
