Churches have adopted Web Streaming Services during this time of pandemic. They broadcast the worship service via that service to members and visitors every Sunday. But how do you go about choosing which streaming services to support?

The budgets of many Churches are hard-pressed right now. It is nearing the end of the year, so Stewardship campaigns are cranking up. Difficult choices often have to be made. Will the Church be able to afford to keep using the multiple web streaming services that they currently have? Or will they consolidate and only use one, or possibly none at all.

Web streaming is a great way to let people who are away from home join in with worship. I have used web streaming while in another state and on the road during worship time. It felt like I was at home. And it was one way to stay connected with my Church even on a trip.

Many churches are now capturing the worship services for later playback on their web site. The technology to do this is readily available. People can even playback the service on their video enabled cell phone. Or they can play the service back on an iPod – i.e. in audio or video mode. Or they can play back the service on their computer over a broadband connection. Or they could receive a DVD of the service via mail or home delivery. Or they could just read the sermon online.

The technical demands of these processes are enormous. It takes a lot of hard disk space to record and process the service. And it takes a broadband connection to upload it to the web server. And the web server has to be capable of handling streaming media. A good rule of thumb is as follows for capturing video live:

For every 5 minutes of video (DV), you will be using up 1GB of hard drive space.

That implies that a one hour service will occupy 12 GB of hard disk space. If you just record the sermon, then you can cut that in half – i.e. 30 min or 6 GB. But this is still a huge load on system resources. Since you want to maintain quality, you will want to capture the service at the highest resolution possible – i.e. in these examples, standard resolution or DVD quality. High Definition would be even more. Then, to process and store the service, you will use up intermediate storage – i.e. rendering space for programs like Final Cut Pro. The overall load on hard disk space is enormous.

How do you plan for and manage this load? There are many approaches you can take. One would be to size the hard disks of your video editing system to handle a year’s worth of worship services, using the rule of thumb above. Another would be to use NAS (i.e. Network Attached Storage) technology to store everything except this week’s worship service. You also need to plan for having a web site with sufficient storage and bandwidth to support all of the services you want to have online at any given time. You will need to manage these spaces so that you do not exceed the limitations of the web host system, as that will incur high fees.