The pieces a Sunday stream is made of
Five things, in the order the picture travels. If any one of them is weak, it is the one people at home notice, so it helps to know what each does before buying anything.
- A camera. One fixed camera on the pulpit and the worship area is enough to start. More cameras need a switcher, which most streaming software has built in.
- Sound from the desk. Take a feed from the mixing desk rather than the camera's own microphone. The congregation hears the room; people at home hear whatever reaches the encoder, and a camera mic picks up the room's echo and the coughs.
- An encoder. Software such as OBS, vMix or Wirecast on a computer, or a hardware box that does nothing else. Our hardware encoder guide lists video units and the settings they need.
- A steady upload. The building's connection only has to carry the one stream you send. A cable to the router is calmer than the guest Wi-Fi on a full Sunday.
- A channel and a player. This is the part that takes your one feed and hands a copy to everyone watching, from a server near each of them, so the building's upload never has to grow with the audience.
The first four live in the building and belong to you. The fifth is what a church streaming service provides, and it is where the rest of this page spends its time.
Getting the service from the sanctuary to your channel
Whoever runs the stream on Sunday finds your channel's encoder settings written out on its dashboard, ready to copy across, so nobody is guessing at a server name on Saturday night. An encoder sending RTMP or SRT is taken in at the closest of our 5 cities to your church; WebRTC from a browser travels directly to the server your channel lives on. Three ways in are offered:
| Way in | When a church uses it | Plans |
|---|---|---|
| RTMP | The default: OBS, vMix, Wirecast and hardware boxes all speak it | Every plan |
| SRT | When the only line at the venue drops packets, such as a church hall sharing its connection or a phone hotspot at an outdoor baptism; SRT resends the pieces lost on the way, so people at home keep a steady picture | Starter and up |
| WHIP (WebRTC) | A guest speaker or a missionary sending from just a laptop browser | Every plan |
The RTMP server address is rtmp://ingest.video.primcast.com/ with your channel's name on the end; the dashboard gives you the stream name and login to go with it. On SRT, every channel has a port and passphrase of its own. The video streaming plans page lists which plan carries what.
The publish password is what lets an encoder go live on your channel. Keep it with the people who run the desk, and if a volunteer leaves, issue a new one from the Live tab and restart: an old encoder can then no longer reconnect.
Putting the service on your church website
You copy one embed code and paste it where the video should appear. The steps:
- Open your channel in the control panel and copy the ready iframe it shows. It already allows fullscreen and picture-in-picture.
- Paste it into the page members already visit, a Watch Live or Sunday page. WordPress, Wix, Squarespace or plain HTML all take it.
- Leave it there all week. The embed code belongs to the channel, not to one broadcast, so the same code serves every Sunday and members never hunt for a new link.
The Cue Player behind that code picks its own way to play. Chrome, Edge and Firefox play through hls.js; Safari on iPhone, iPad and Mac uses Apple's built-in HLS. Many site builders lock embeds into a sandbox where ordinary web players go black on Apple devices; this one notices and plays anyway. When a connection weakens, the player steps down to a lighter rendition when several were transcoded (adaptive transcoding is on Platinum), and steps back up when the line recovers.
Reaching members on their phones
A phone needs nothing installed: the same church web page plays in the phone's browser. One thing surprises first-time streamers. Mobile browsers only allow a video to start by itself with the sound off, so the service begins muted and the viewer taps for sound. A line under the player saying "tap the picture for sound" saves a lot of messages to the office.
If you want an app with the church's name in the stores, the control panel builds the channel's Android and iPhone player apps, and you publish them under your own developer accounts. Our publishing guides walk through Google Play and the App Store screen by screen. The church streaming page lists distribution to Roku, Amazon, mobile and desktop on the enterprise plan, so ask us which plan covers the apps you have in mind.
Facebook and YouTube from the same feed
Add them as restream targets in the Live tab, and the one feed from your encoder goes to your own player and to them together. Up to 5 targets run at once (YouTube, Facebook, Twitch or any custom RTMP address), and each one can be switched on or off in the middle of the service. That last part matters on Sundays: if a platform flags a song, you can turn that destination off for a few minutes while your website keeps playing.
Your own page is the one you control. Social platforms set their own rules, which is why it pays to point members at the church website first and treat the social copies as extra reach.
Worship music and streaming licences (general information)
Singing a song in the building and sending it over the internet are different uses, and the second one usually needs its own licence. CCLI is one licensing body churches use, and the points below come from its US help centre. What follows is our general reading of CCLI's own help pages, not legal advice; check your licences with CCLI or the body in your country.
- CCLI says its Church Copyright License is needed to cover reproducing worship songs during services, and its Streaming Licenses are supplementary to it.
- Its Streaming License covers streaming or webcasting worship services at any time during the week, not only Sunday mornings, and permits authorised music performed live in your online services.
- The Streaming Plus License extends that to song recordings such as artist tracks, backing tracks and multitracks.
- Neither covers other copyrighted works, such as a film clip in the sermon, which need their own permission.
- CCLI also says its terms do not override a streaming platform's terms, so automated copyright checks on social sites can still flag a song you are licensed to stream.
Keep a list of the songs used each week: CCLI says reporting for its Streaming and Streaming Plus licences is ongoing, done on its reporting website whenever licensed songs are used, and a running list makes that easy.
Picking the plan that matches your congregation
Choose by how many people watch at the same moment and how many separate feeds you run. Every video plan includes the CDN in all 5 cities, HLS and MPEG-DASH, live thumbnails, and the website and country rules. The differences that matter to a church, as our video plans page states them (prices are on that page):
| Starter | Pro | Platinum | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Live channels | 1 | 3 | 10 |
| Viewers at once, per channel | 1,000 | 5,000 | 25,000 |
| Rewind during the stream | 2 hours | 1 day | 7 days |
| Recordings kept for | 7 days | 30 days | 90 days |
| Video library for past sermons | 50 GB | 200 GB | 2 TB |
| Standby origin with automatic failover | No | No | Yes |
A single congregation usually starts on one channel. A church with a second campus, a youth service in another room, or an overflow feed is where Pro's 3 channels earn their place; a network of campuses or a conference with several stages is what Platinum's 10 are for. You can pay monthly or yearly and move up or down when the congregation changes.
Before your first live Sunday
- Rehearse midweek on the real channel, not a test account, with the same encoder, cable and settings you will use on the day.
- Watch it on a phone over mobile data, away from the church Wi-Fi, so you see what members at home see.
- Listen with headphones to the stream, not the room. Sound problems are the ones people leave over.
- Go live a few minutes before the prelude with a slide or the empty sanctuary, so latecomers find the stream already running.
- Name one person as the stream watcher, with the dashboard open on the Status view: whether you are live, the rate the encoder sends, and how many are watching.
When a hosted channel is not the right fit
A channel has a viewer limit per channel, enforced on the channel, so plan for your busiest Sunday (Easter, Christmas, a funeral that draws the whole town) rather than an ordinary one. If you need more than Platinum carries, or want to run your own streaming software, a ministry can move to a dedicated streaming server on the same network, with the same people answering. And if all you need is sound, for members who listen rather than watch, audio streaming is a lighter fit than a video channel.
Questions people ask
- How fast does the church internet connection need to be?
- It only has to carry the single stream your encoder sends, because the copies for viewers are made by the CDN, not by your building. Measure the upload at the time of the service, when the building is busy, and set the encoder's rate comfortably below it. If the building's line loses packets at busy moments, choose a plan with SRT (Starter and up): it resends the pieces lost on the way, so the picture at home holds steady.
- Can members watch last week's sermon?
- Yes. Recordings stay in the channel for 7 days on Starter, 30 on Pro and 90 on Platinum. For a longer archive, the video library on those plans gives every file its own player and embed code, so a sermon page on your website can list past services below the live player.
- Will ads play during the service?
- No. The channel does not insert ads by default. The church page notes you keep full control if you ever decide you want income from the channel.
- How far behind the live service will viewers be?
- Regular HLS, with a longer delay than the low-latency kind, suits a service where people watch rather than talk back. Low-latency HLS, on Starter and up, was measured at about six seconds behind live. The player can also play WebRTC in under a second, for a midweek study where people respond; ask us how to set it up for your channel.
- Can we keep the stream to our own website?
- Yes. Website rules make the stream refuse to play when someone copies the embed onto another page, country and IP rules limit where it plays, and expiring signed links let a members' area hand each viewer a link that runs out. These are on every plan.
- What happens if the stream drops during the service?
- Check the encoder first: the Status view shows whether it is still sending. From the Live tab you can disconnect a frozen encoder or restart the channel. Streaming experts are available around the clock, and the service agreement credits you if the network is down for more than fifteen minutes.