This is a follow up post. If you haven’t already I suggest you start by checking out the previous one: 6 Reasons To Only Stream To Your Church Website here.
There is a cost of streaming to your church’s website. To start, you have to invest in several pieces of hardware. And yes, theoretically, all you need is a smart phone and a strong broadband connection. However, the chances your Pastor will hold a phone up to his face during a sermon is slim to none. So, unless you’ve invented a way to mount a smartphone to your pastor’s body in a way that won’t interrupt his preaching, or distract the congregation, you’ll need to invest in live streaming hardware.
To start, you’ll need an HD camera, a reasonably powerful computer, a microphone, and a sound mixer. The combined cost for this equipment can range, but it’s safe to assume you’re looking at a minimum of several hundred to a few thousand dollars, even if you buy used equipment. For a small church, that’s quite an investment. Asking a congregation of only a dozen or two dozen members for this type of investment can put a significant dent in other ministries.
This investment is why it’s important to provide a gateway to live and recorded ministry content through a medium you can control, and that does not have unintended consequences that draw people away instead.
Once you have invested in all this hardware, and assuming you have invested already in a subscription for a website, why not leverage that investment as much as possible in order reach others more effectively, and engage your congregation?
Think of this as being a good steward with the tools the church has at her disposal. You want to stretch and pull and make the most out of this very powerful outreach and engagement tool.
Faithlife has a great list of recommended streaming equipment here.
Cost of Streaming on Your Website
As already mentioned, if your church is considering live streaming sermons to the web, there is a hardware investment required. That cost is generally fixed at least for a few years.
Many times a church is looking to stream to more than just one social network. As I have seen over the past 2 years of this COVID pandemic, Facebook and YouTube are the most popular platforms.
In order to multi-cast the church service stream an additional service is required to buffer the single feed and push the stream to both networks. This is where services like Faithlife Live Stream, Subsplash, Wowza, or MightStream come in.
Each will allow you to multicast or multi-stream your sermon to your website, and dozens of social networks at once. The difference is you have full control of your own video player for your website.
These video players will not present ads, will not suggest other content, and will be fully branded as your church, giving visitors an engaging experience that does not draw attention away from your sermon, your message, and your church.
So what do these services cost?
Cost of streaming services can range from as little as $30 a month to several hundred dollars a month depending on the size of your church, how many hours of streaming each month, and the number of viewers per stream.
For example, Faithlife Live Steaming starts at $89 dollars and includes 10 hours of streaming per month, 100Gb of video storage, and unlimited viewers. This is a great option that covers most small churches at a fixed cost per month. You may not have more than 50 or 100 viewers at any one-time, but you have room to grow.
A much more budget-friendly option is a service called MightStream. MightStream can cost as little as $8 for 1 hour of streaming per month and 20 viewers. MightStream’s model is great for a very small congregation that will only have a few viewers, therefore minimizing the cost per stream. A more pragmatic pricing example is four 1-hour services for 25 viewers will cost $33 a month.
Other services like Subsplash come with a much more robust experience that takes an all-in-one approach providing a mobile app, online giving, live streaming, video hosting, a website, and much more for one monthly cost. And that cost is dependent upon congregation size so you can expect a full-featured experience no matter how small the church.
Below are other streaming services and their starting monthly cost (some services have a calculator to better estimate total cost):
– Vimeo $75/mo
– Dacast $39/mo
– Boxcast $99/mo
– SermonCast $49/mo
– Castr $50/mo
– Wowza $25/mo
– ChurchStreaming.tv $79/mo – Switcher Studio $45/mo
With options that can cost as little as $8 a month, there is no reason for a church to rely only on social media networks to live broadcast their services.
God bless you and may your Christ-proclaiming, Gospel-centered sermons be heard around the world.
What solutions is your church currently using? Anything else to add?
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