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Using livestreaming to uplift worship services
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Thomas Chang, assistant vice president in the Consumer Product Center at ATEN International, discusses how livestreaming solutions can help houses of worship reach wider audiences with higher production quality
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Thomas Chang
Livestreaming at Immanuel Baptist Church in Arkansas THE ONGOING PANDEMIC situation has put a strain, or complete halt, on in-person attendance for many houses of worship around the world. Just as it seemed that the era of “virtual congregations” was coming to a close and worshippers could regather in person, new waves of the pandemic struck in various countries and governments issued new lockdown orders and halted public gatherings. For houses of worship that in recent years had already been facing the challenge of low attendance, the Covid-19 crisis couldn’t have come at a worse time. But not all hope is lost. Technology in various forms has helped to keep worship services running, and chief among them is livestreaming. However, rather than simply rely on using a smartphone to stream on a single platform, today’s houses of worship need to be more tech savvy to keep pace with viewer expectations. Doing so can be complicated, expensive and require extra manpower to control cameras,
switch between them and create graphical overlays or other effects. However, new livestreaming devices have hit the market recently that make the process much easier, faster and cheaper for end users. With solutions such as these, houses of worship can create professionallevel livestreaming content on the fly and ensure their worshippers can take part in an uplifting service, no matter where they are.
Create better livestreams with a few tools Communities of faith have a lot to contend with these days: depending on their state or national laws, they might be operating under a hybrid model or not have any in-person
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The ATEN UC9040 StreamLIVE PRO is an all-in-one four-port HDMI AV mixer gatherings at all. What applies today might be different tomorrow, too. In the US, for example, most states have limited in-person worship services, and 10 states have prevented them altogether. Only a handful of states, such as Texas, deemed in-person worship services to be essential.
In-person gatherings must follow social distancing, cutting down indoor capacity to something between 50% or even all the way down to 20% of pre-Covid attendance. One workaround has been for houses of worship to also hold drive-in services, but this cuts down attendance numbers even more. In addition, drive-in worship services are also not future-proof as governments can issue stay-at-home or shelter-in-place orders at a moment’s notice. Houses of worship have largely, though, turned to the internet to get their message out and hold worship services. Everyone, from the smallest church to the Office of Campus Ministry of Notre Dame, has been holding online services and even virtual retreats. For most, this means using video conference platforms such as Zoom, Skype, Teams and more. It also largely means a one-camera setup with no transitions and no overlays or other effects, and even poor audio quality, to grab viewers’ attention. Yet certain devices can bypass these issues and, unlike
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26/01/2021 16:01
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