Attending church services in person has been a sacred ritual for decades. For many, it is a core component of their everyday routine. However, the novel coronavirus pandemic has radically impacted congregational church services, canceled worship events, and suspended Sunday schools. Consequently, churches have embraced live streaming to maintain their religious services and engagement with community members.
In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been a vivid change witnessed in the Christian community’s religious habits. The majority of the community members have resorted to praying for an end to this deadly virus, while others gave up in-person visits to the churches. According to the Gallup report, churches have responded well to these behavioral changes with “a quick shift of religious services from in-person to online worship.” As a result, Time reports an increased attendance level of the church services during the outbreak.
Read More: How Can Churches Benefit From Live Streaming?
Interestingly, however, as we embrace the new normal, live streaming seems to have deeply embedded into our everyday lives. We have reaped and realized the immense potential of live streaming church services, and most of us have wholeheartedly switched to the new worship order.
That said, many community members are also barred from attending in-person church services due to several other reasons, such as physical disability, chronic illness, necessary traveling, commuting issues, and so forth. Thankfully, in this modern era of live streaming technologies, they can all actively participate in church services despite their apprehensions and limitations.
In this Article:
📸 What Do You Need for Live Streaming?
The most prominent concern, undoubtedly, remains the investment budget. What equipment and gear are required for live streaming? How much funding must be spared for this activity? Does it require a dedicated resource for effective running?
Worry no more; you don’t need to spare much. Instead, you can keep the budget pretty minimal and regular. All you need is a stable internet connection and a camera- and microphone-enabled device. Be it a smartphone, a DSLR, a laptop, a camcorder, or a tablet — everything works equally fine. However, while it is always possible to set up a live streaming setup for your church free of cost, it wouldn’t hurt to invest a little to enjoy high-quality videos and multicasting to multiple social media and your website.
In terms of hardware, you might want to invest in:
- A tripod to hold the camera and ensure a stable video
- A microphone to further enhance the audio quality of your live stream
- An HDMI cable to connect the camera to your computer
- A Gimbal, if you wish to move the camera with the subject
- A video switcher, if you are using multiple cameras to offer multi-view angels to your audience.
Read More: Checklist for Professional Live Streaming
🎙️Do You Need a Live Streaming Platform?
If you only wish to live stream on a single medium, then you are good to go ahead with the in-built live streaming feature available on various social media. You can implement it for free on platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram. However, if you want to integrate your live streams on your church website, or if you wish to multistream to more than one social media simultaneously, you will need a live streaming platform.
😎 Which is the Best Live Streaming Platform?
A quick Google search will land you over several live streaming service providers who offer integrated live streaming services. You’ll, in fact, be bombarded with a number of alternative live streaming platforms. However, experts advise using OneStream Live for ready-made live streaming solutions to enjoy live streaming to multiple platforms from a single touchpoint. You can broadcast your church services on several social media and your church website at the same time using OneStream Live. You can broadcast a pre-recorded video, go live in real-time using any third-party app such as Zoom, OBS, XSplit, Ecamm, etc, and create a live session directly from the browser using OneStream Studio. You can subscribe to whichever package plan suits your needs. And with a few simple GUI-based steps, you can configure your accounts to OneStream Live Dashboard, that too, without having to worry about the coding hassle.
Read More: Top 3 Strategies for Better Church Live Streaming
📑 What if You Don't Have a Website?
If your church does not have a website, you can leverage OneStream Live’s intuitive embed player feature – Hosted Live Pages. With Hosted Live Pages, you can create a personalized live streaming webpage for your church, using several in-built customizable templates. You can add links to your social media, add a catchy and SEO-friendly title and description, customize backgrounds, colors, font, engage with viewers via Live Chat, and a lot more. You can even collect online donations by diverting the audience from this webpage to your donation collection form.
🚀Why Choose OneStream Live?
OneStream Live’s cutting-edge technology offers a plethora of benefits for live streaming of your church service:
- Create live sessions using OneStream Studio.
- Add guests to your live streams and go https://blog.onestream.live/how-to-add-guests-to-your-live-streams-using-onestream-studio/live on multiple platforms and the website at the same time.
- Brand your live streams with Backgrounds, Intervals, Layouts, and Countdown timers.
- Display your products and boost sales in your live streams using the Live Sales feature.
- Bring all the chat from your social media and website in one place, and communicate with the audience easily.
- Multicast to more than 45 social media platforms, including Facebook, YouTube, Twitch, Twitter, Instagram, and many more.
- Schedule pre-recorded videos for live streaming to social media up to 60 days in advance.
- Use real-time streaming tools such asOBS, Zoom, Ecamm, and XSplit to multi-stream across social media.
- Embed your live streams on your church website to reach a wider audience.
- Create a personalized webpage for your church, if you don’t have a website.
- Queue pre-recorded videos in a playlist and schedule them to go live on multiple social media as real-time live videos.
- Import videos directly from Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox, pCloud, Zoom recordings, Box storage, S3 or Frame.io to save your internet bandwidth.
💯 Concluding Thoughts
If your church has not started live streaming services as yet, this Easter is the perfect time to do so. Engage with a wider audience by live streaming through OneStream Live, and bond with your community in faith. Create your own eye-catchy live streaming webpage and spread hope and peace through soul-uplifting prayer services live streams.
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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!
