One of the big mistakes churches make when they first start live streaming is confusing the advertised download speed (which makes things like web browsing and video watching faster) with upload speed (which is necessary for sending any amount of content TO the internet, instead of consuming content FROM it).A church with adequate upload bandwidth might be pretty happy with themselves and think that it will all be smooth sailing from there. Sadly, this isn't the case. There are more links in the chain than just your church's upload speed.
WiFi Saturation
On the other end of the live-stream, you have a variable that you can't control at all: People watching the live stream might not have enough bandwidth to do so without issues.Or perhaps they would have enough were it not for other factors that make live streaming more difficult, in their situation.Let's start with where your online congregation is watching. Are they in the suburbs with houses, close by, but not too close to one another and using WiFi?
If an online viewer’s neighborhood is a little more crowded,especially with people who tend to be online more, WiFi saturation could cause problems on their end.
Then, maybe they're fine. If their neighborhood is a little more crowded, especially with people who tend to be online more, WiFi saturation could cause problems on their end. Apartment dwellers might have it even worse.People in the middle of nowhere likely have fewer issues with WiFi saturation, but that doesn't mean that churches with more rural congregations have less trouble. Just like wiring for electricity and telephones didn't make a lot of economic sense in the early 20th century, wiring for broadband internet may not have made it all the way to the more remote locations in the 21st. There are solutions like satellite, cellular and fixed wireless, but they each have their own challenges.
Resolution Issues
Another problem to consider is the various resolutions (and their accompanying bit rates) people could be watching at. If you only send out a 4K live stream and have nothing in place to downsample the quality of it, fewer people would be able to watch.Ideally, you'd either live stream multiple versions at once, from lower resolution to the highest, or your live-streaming host would do it for you. That way, if someone watching on an older television can't display 4K, they wouldn't stream it from the host. Likewise, if their internet couldn't receive the amount of data necessary quickly enough, the live stream they receive should be lower quality than what they could theoretically display with their hardware (phone, television, tablet, etc.).
Some Outliers
In the middle of the chain, there are other potential problems. If your church doesn't pay a live-streaming host and depends on free services like Facebook and YouTube, you might run into delivery problems that your free solution doesn't seem motivated to fix quickly. Whether it's true objectively or not, it sure seems like Facebook "moves fast and breaks things" with its live streaming more often on Sundays than other days. When that does happen, church tech Facebook groups provide help because others in your position will usually ask, "Is anyone else having trouble with Facebook live streaming today?"
While light could travel around the earth 7.5 times in a second, that doesn't mean the route between your church and your live-streaming host's servers is a straight line.
It gets complicated when the problem isn't network-wide, but localized. Maybe there's a problem with certain servers, but not all. If that's the case, the "working fine here" responses might add confusion and drown out the "I'm having a problem, too" ones.YouTube's problems with live streaming seem more political than technical, so they might be even more difficult to nail down. You might only be talking about traditional Christian beliefs, as you do every week, but one rubs a faceless moderator the wrong way and your live-stream is gone.It really is true that you get what you pay for, at least with live streaming.
Encoding With Relative Ease
It's easy to blame others for problems, but often, that's not the cause at all.For example, when you havedropped frames, it could be a result of how you're encoding. Encoding a live stream requiresa lot of computing power. So, ifyou're doing something else on a computer, using older hardware, have malware or other security problems, or have older encoding software, then that could be the cause of your problems, even if everything else in the chain is fine.The solution here is to upgrade your encoding method by either using a different (often newer) computer and/or software or using a dedicated encoding hardware. Since they're purpose-built, hardware encoders tend to be more reliable, but not all are created equally. Make sure you read all about any upgrades you buy before you buy them. For example, Facebook requires RTMPS and some older hardware doesn't support anything other than RTMP. You might also think that sending a live stream to any host you want is supported, for sure, but make sure that the encoder CAN do that—don't assume.Whether you're upgrading hardware or software, be careful not to overspend on features you'll never use. Just because another church uses it, that doesn't mean it's right for your church.
Host Considerations
Then, there's the problem of live-streaming hosts themselves. They won't all have this problem, but depending on where your church is located and where their servers are located, you might have an issue. Light speed is still a hard limit to how fast data can travel. While light could travel around the earth 7.5 times in a second, that doesn't mean the route between your church and your live-streaming host's servers is a straight line. Think about it this way, the circumference of the earth is just under 25,000 miles, but all the blood vessels in an average adult human, laid end to end, are about 4x that long. By going back and forth or around and back, there might be quite a delay in sending data to a distant server.In fact, depending on the path you could get all sorts of problems introduced into a live stream. The path from your church to the live-streaming host might be much longer or run into delays that you wouldn't expect. This could mean that your live stream might lose packets, too. Packet loss is expected, and there are safeguards built into live-streaming protocols to deal with a certain amount of loss, but more loss is harder to compensate for than less.It's for reasons like these that larger companies have servers all over the world. A smaller company might not have the same resources, and so your proximity to their servers could matter quite a lot.
Whether it's true objectively or not, it sure seems like Facebook "moves fast and breaks things" with its live streaming moreoften on Sundays than other days.
So, Be Smart
There really is a lot to consider when it comes to live streaming. It's not as simple as having enough bandwidth, although that matters. Every decision you make (and even where people are watching from) makes a difference and affects whether people see your live stream as pristine video or a jumbled mess. So, keep all these factors in mind as you live stream so that your church gets the best result—one where the technology steps out of the way, not one where it makes itself painfully obvious.
