Choosing The Best Live Streaming Provider For Your Church

by: Rob Desilets Posted: 12/16/2014

If you are planning to live stream your church services there are many important factors to consider when evaluating a service provider.

Support Response Time
Whether your viewers are across the globe, at home sick, or on vacation, they will rely on your live stream to be on time and perfect each week. Pricing and features do not matter if your stream is down and no one is immediately available to help you troubleshoot and get your stream back online quickly...

Flat-rate Unlimited Streaming
Live streaming is based on transferring video and audio data (also referred to as bandwidth) from your church to the streaming provider and then from their systems to your viewers...

Full Functionality Trial
Every streaming provider should provide at least a 30 day full functionality free trial. If you need more than 30 days they should extend the trial period as long as you need to thoroughly complete your evaluation...

Advertisement Free
Someone is paying for the resources your live stream is using - if it’s not you it’s an advertiser. Most, if not all, of the free streaming services online will place advertisements before, during, and after your broadcast...

Embedding
Embedding is a term that describes putting another company’s web component/widget on your web site. Example widgets are a countdown timer, a live stream or archive player, or an online donation button...

Viewable on All Devices
Your live stream and archives should be viewable from a computer (PC or Mac), mobile device (iPhone/iPad/Android), custom app, and set-top devices such as Roku. Your viewer’s device should be auto detected and the live stream started automatically. In addition, your provider should support adaptive bitrate streaming...

These and other related topics are discussed in this article.

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