How to livestream to your website (For Free)
For Americans, there are only two places a church should consider posting their livestream: YouTube and your church’s website. Most other options are clearly less functional for almost all American churches. We’ll go through why that is in another article (We touch on it in our Free Guide to Church Livestreaming).
It’s somewhat easy to see how to stream to YouTube (though I would highly suggest you use a hardware device for this, because it’s so much easier on volunteers).
But what if you want to stream to your church’s website? That seems much more complex, doesn’t it? Wouldn’t it depend on who hosts your website, and all sorts of complexities like that?
Not at all. It’s fairly simple.
Essentially, you need two tools:
A video streaming platform, like YouTube (or Boxcast, or Resi…but YouTube is free), and
Before we go any farther, I should clarify: I don’t have a financial stake in Online.Church. They don’t pay me. It’s just a great tool, and I think many churches should consider using it.
So what are these tools?
First, your video streaming platform is doing all the hard work here. It’s streaming big video signals across the internet.
Second, it’s the Online.Church platform that’s doing the interesting work. Essentially, it creates (what looks like) a page on your website. That page includes your church’s livestream video (from YouTube, Resi or Boxcast), a chat box on the side, and a list of tools that are helpful to hosting a worship service. It has functions that let a church volunteer (often called a “host”) call for prayer requests. It reminds viewers/parishioners to donate at a convenient link. Things like that. Online.Church creates a great portal for your church livestream….and it looks like it’s on your website.
Here are a few more things that make Online.Church very interesting, even to smaller churches:
It works on any website. Yes, it will work on your website. It does this by creating a page that is hosted on Online.Church’s servers. Your website simply has a link that says “Online Worship Here,” and that link points to the Online.Church page set up for your church. The end result is fairly seamless to users.
It’s free. It’s paid for by a church in Texas that considers this a part of their ministry in the world. Thanks, Life.Church!
It’s pretty easy to set up.
If you use it, and really leverage it, it can be a great way to turn live streaming into more of a community ministry. That is, you can engage viewers more effectively than on most other platforms. That’s particularly useful because of research
If you want to see a small church that does this well, visit Trinity North Park, in San Diego.
