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As churches explore ways to expand their reach and move beyond the four walls of their building, live streaming is proving to be one of the most effective ways to share worship experiences, classes and special events with a worldwide community. Many studies today indicate that the average “regular” churchgoer attends less than 1.8 times a month. Churches are looking for ways to keep these members more engaged and connected, even when they're on the go.
Unfortunately, there's a catch. Creating a quality live stream can be exceedingly difficult, even for experienced IT professionals. The learning curve is full of baffling concepts and acronyms such like ABR, CDNs and HTML5. It's this degree of difficulty that's driven many churches to abandon the idea of streaming altogether.
Playing in the Big Leagues
As a result, creating a quality live stream has often been reserved mostly for churches able to afford their own internal IT staff and infrastructures. For churches without this kind of support, this monumental task has often fallen to the already-overworked tech director. Fortunately, tech directors seem to be exactly the kind of professional Wowza had in mind when they designed their new Wowza Streaming Cloud service.
For those unfamiliar with live streaming, Wowza was founded in 2005 and is one of the most respected companies in the field. Currently, churches such as Saddleback, Willow Creek and Church of the Resurrection depend on Wowza streaming technology to connect with viewer the world over each and every week. With the introduction of Wowza Streaming Cloud, getting a world-class streaming platform up and running has never been easier, or more affordable.
Throw me a Lifeline
Conversations about streaming often begin with two essential questions: “How much will this cost us?” and “How soon can we see a finished product?” Utilizing the Streaming Cloud service, the answers to those questions become surprisingly easy to determine.
Believe it or not, with Wowza Streaming Cloud all you need is an iPhone running Wowza’s free GoCoder app and a decent Internet connection.
Previously, creating such a platform required end users to set up an in-house server foundation, including hardware, software, bandwidth and an IT professional, in order to facilitate multiple transcoding streams that adapt to the needs of individual viewers. Start up costs on these systems can easily reach into the tens of thousands of dollars, all of which must be invested before knowing what the eventual impact or demand will be. Wowza Streaming Cloud creates an alternate path for churches beginning to test the waters by removing the need for most of that infrastructure.
Connecting to the cloud service happens inside of Wowza's HTML-based interface. The website walks the end user through the process of ensuring that your hardware is communicating effectively with the Cloud server. Once you begin uploading a single H.264 or H.265 live stream the Cloud takes care of everything else, including transcoding, delivery and traffic monitoring. The service will even let you proactively schedule the start and stop time for your live stream, allowing tech directors to focus more on the live experience and less on the stream itself.
Launching Pad
So what do you need to get started creating your own live stream? With Wowza Streaming Cloud all you really need is an iPhone running Wowza's free GoCoder app and a decent Internet connection. The app itself uses the iPhone's own camera and internal processing to create an H.264 live stream that uploads to the Cloud for processing and distribution. Wowza will even create and host a webpage where you can view your stream on a dedicated, sharable URL.
It's not a long-term solution in terms of quality, but it is an extremely efficient way to get your toes wet in the world of streaming. It's also a useful way to begin meaningful conversations with executive leadership about what you can hope to accomplish long-term with streaming.
At first blush, the simplicity of Wowza Streaming Cloud borders on magic. The entire interface is web-based, which includes extensive support and educational resources. For technicians who have spent years struggling to create similar solutions in-house, be warned: Streaming Cloud going to feel a lot like cheating. Which, of course, is usually the mark of great technology in the first place.
Next Steps
Once you decide to get more serious about streaming it will be important to begin incorporating higher quality audio and video sources, as well as a solid front-end encoding solution. The good news is that most churches running live sound and IMAG often have a lot of the gear needed in this regard. Pulling final audio and video outputs from your live mixer and switcher is usually a great starting point.
A key first step will be purchasing an encoding solution, which will capture your video and audio mixes and create a realtime H.264-encoded live stream for broadcast. One great encoding device for people starting out in streaming is the Teradek ViDiU, but there are a number of similar solutions that will fit your specific context, including popular hardware and software solutions from Matrox, NewTek, Telestream, and Sony.
Once your streaming encoder is in place the Cloud service provides step-by-step guidance to making sure it's cooperating effectively with your hardware/software. One of most impressive things about Wowza Streaming Cloud is the way it can be as simple, or as complex, as you need it to be. When starting out, most of the default parameters will provide a great starting point. When you're ready to start maximizing the effectiveness of your live stream you'll find all the power you need waiting under the hood.
Wowza Streaming Cloud is easily one of the most budget-friendly ways around to create high-quality live streams. Costs a broken down into different tiers, based on the amount of system processing and network bandwidth needed. Many churches start out with the pay-as-you-go plan, which provides 2 hours of transcoding and 10GB of network usage for $15 a month. Another popular tier is the 10/100 subscriptions, which allows 10 hours of transcoding and 100GB of network usage for $50 a month. With no long-term contracts required, it's easy to adjust your service tier at any time to best support your current demands or budget restrictions.
In conclusion
Over time, most tech directors have learned to avoid entry-level products and services, as they tend to require a complete re-learning when it's time to graduate to the “professional” version. Wowza Streaming Cloud turns that idea on its head—it's a world-class professional solution with entry-level accessibility. If you're leading a church currently exploring the potential of live streaming, you owe it to yourself to spend an hour playing around with the free trial of the service. You'll be glad you did.
List Price: Pay-as-you-go plan starts at $15/mo.; 10/100 plan starts at $50/mo.
