It seems to me that one of the tech “milestones” for a startup church is recording the service. Once you get there you can sell/give CDs of the service, let the pastor listen to his sermons (if he isn’t, he should be!) and you can offer online downloads, podcasts, and with a $10 flash app, put a “Listen to last week’s service” right on the front page of your church site.
But for some reason I see a lot of churches assume that the next logical step is to do a live broadcast of the service online. Here are my thoughts on the subject, and hopefully will help you in making a decision when considering this move.
Firstly, live “anything” is always a costly endeavor, and I honestly believe that the cons VASTLY outweigh the pros in 99% of churches. Let’s look at it from a tech standpoint, then a cultural one, and finally I’ll talk about when I think it IS feasible to do a live simulcast.
Practically, you’re adding a lot of cost, bandwidth, stress, and expectancy for very little ROI. First, you have to figure out how to get internet access to your service, with redundancy. If you own the location you meet in this might not be too big of a problem. But you still need backup bandwidth, in case your DSL goes down in the middle of a service. If you’re in a portable/temporary location getting Internet is a little more challenging. Even if your current location provides wifi, you run the risk of someone changing settings during the week and not informing you. You also have the very real possibility of outgrowing your current location, and the new site might not have Internet as readily available. That aside, bandwidth isn’t cheap. A semi-decent MP3 is encoded at 128kbps. You can get away with an speaking audio only (no music) 32kbps stream, or a 256kbps video stream, but bigger would be better. Let’s say you have a dedicated T1 line (couple hundred bucks a month), and your going to live stream the service, not taking into account any overhead (which can be up to 50%) that still less than 50 people able to listen, and only 6 can watch. Six! If you only have cable internet or DSL, and not a pricey T1, you can halve that. My slingbox is a great example of how poorly streaming-video looks on low-upstream bandwidth. You can cut down on bandwidth by either a) massively compressing the video, b) cutting the frame rate down to 10fps or less, c) batch encoding the video into a postage stamp sized window, or d) a combination of all the above. Again, this goes back to return on investment. You WILL have to compromise on quality to do live. Alternately, you can rent bandwidth from a central, managed server. Then you can push one connection to the server, and let it handle all the distribution. But that will set you back a youth pastor’s salary on a monthly basis.
Culturally, we are moving away from the live broadcast model. It’s old fashioned and antiquated. Before recording became readily available, radio, and later television, was broadcast live, and if you wanted to catch your show, you had make sure you were home on time, and tuned to the right frequency. The VCR started to change all that. If you had a PhD in astrophysics, you could figure out how to stop the flashing “12:00″, and tell the VCR to record your show while you were out. Then came Tivo, and the DVR became commonplace. Now with Hulu, video podcasts, Apple TV, etc. it’s become even easier to watch your shows when YOU want, not when the network dictates. I recently saw a statistic that Sci-Fi’s show Eureka had a much bigger viewership that watched on their DVR compared to a smaller percentage that watched it live. As a culture, we are moving away from the live broadcast model. The exception to this is sporting events, but by-and-large, we want to watch what we want to watch, when we want to watch it. It doesn’t make sense to me for a church to try to resort to the old model.
My other reasoning against a live service online is the reason people aren’t physically at church, and might be watching online. I figure they’re most likely out of town, and if that’s the case, the chances they’ll want to log on to your website at the exact moment your service starts are pretty slim, especially if they are in another time zone. Or they may be sick, or needing to sleep in on a Sunday morning. Still, it seems to me that it would be either more convenient, or at least, no less convenient to watch it later via podcast or through a website flash player.
I do believe there is an exception to this rule. If you church has grown to a size that it can feasibly support a well run online service, you can build a community online. Lifechurch.tv and Seacoast both do live video campuses, but they both have the finances, and the online congregation to both support it, and justify the expense.
Anytime you add a feature to your church, you must be prepared to maintain it, because people will come to expect it. But if you do live anything, you have to have a contingency plan for when the primary system fails. I believe it’s far better stewardship to do a podcast and/or online video that people can access on their own schedule, since it gives you so much more freedom, and is so much cheaper.