What All Churches Need to Know about Building a Broadcast Ministry

There was a time when TV broadcast ministries were restricted to churches wealthy enough to create their own production/distribution systems, and those lucky enough to live in places with TV stations willing to send their cameras to church sites.

The advent of streaming over the internet has changed all that. Nowadays, anyone with a smartphone and connection to Facebook can stream their services worldwide – and many churches are doing just that. The reason? “During the pandemic we have learned that being in the game is almost more important than the quality of production,” said Chad Rose, Worship Experience Specialist with the AV consultancy Paragon 360. “To ensure that they can reach their flocks even during lockdowns, we have seen churches of all sizes embrace live streaming using everything from phone cameras to full production suites.

This being said, the public is accustomed to broadcast-quality video. This makes them unlikely to keep watching broadcast ministries with poor video quality and single camera views. Knowing this fact – and acting on it – is just one thing all churches need to know about building a broadcast ministry. Here are some more must-knows.

Quality is Affordable

We have established that smoothly switched, multi-camera video is a must for retaining broadcast ministry viewers. Fortunately, the days of such technology being too expensive for most churches is over.

A case in point: “Today you could do a four-camera production with four relatively small cameras and a very small switcher and set up your production station in the back of the church on a card table,” said Bob Caniglia, Blackmagic Design’s Director of Sales Operations. “The best news is that the equipment is inexpensive. At Blackmagic Design, for instance, we have several small broadcast-quality cameras available for $1,295 each, while all the audio you need can likely be ported directly to the feed from the church’s existing audio system.”

Speaking of switchers, Blackmagic Design’s ATEM Mini HDMI Live Switcher can handle up to four cameras with six basic ‘wipes’ (video mixing effects), plus two audio channels, all for $295. At prices like these, “you could start off relatively small – say one or two cameras – with basically the proceeds of a good bake sale and get enough money to equip a very nice setup that you can either record to broadcast later on YouTube, or stream live directly to Facebook, YouTube and other social media platforms.” Caniglia said. “The point is that quality is now affordable.”

Streaming or Broadcasting?

There is no doubt that streaming is popular with the public, whether they go to church or not. In fact, “streaming is quickly overtaking terrestrial broadcast as more people are consuming content on their mobile devices,” said Rose. “Churches of all sizes now have the opportunity to present their services to a large audience without signing expensive broadcast contracts. Besides, the equipment needed for television broadcast requires a great deal more investment while streaming can be done on a modest budget.”

“Streaming, as you can imagine, provides a more convenient viewing experience for parishioners, due to the ability of churches to post live and recorded content on YouTube, Facebook and Twitter that people can access anywhere,” said Satoshi Kanemura. (He is President and COO of For-A, a maker of broadcast quality AV equipment with a complete range of affordable products for churches.) But broadcast TV also has its advantages, he noted, such as “the reliability of broadcast TV signals, their wide reach over the air, and the lack of any time delays.”

“To do a broadcast on terrestrial television you must have an arrangement with a local station or stations, which is actually not difficult to arrange,” Caniglia said. “The benefit of going over the air is that you are able to reach people who don’t have internet service – or if they do, it is dial-up and too slow to support streaming video – plus those who have broadband available in their area but aren’t computer-savvy enough to watch your services online.”

So which distribution option should a church choose for its broadcast ministry? There is no one-size-fits-all answer to this question, but the clue to the right choice lies in the nature of the audience the church is trying to reach.

For instance, if this congregation has broadband internet access in their homes and smartphones, then lower-cost streaming is a smart bet for broadcast ministries. But if these people are in underserved rural areas with dial-up internet, then over-the-air TV broadcasting could be the better way to go. And bear in mind that there is a third case where using both options may be the best move for a church’s broadcast ministry, as long as the results of doing both justify the cost.

Make Choices with Volunteers in Mind

Unless you belong to a mega-church with deep pockets, chances are that your church’s AV systems are operated to some degree by volunteers, most of whom are AV newbies. In these circumstances, it is vital for the church’s broadcast ministry production system to be as easy to operate as possible.

“Not only should you choose equipment that is built for ease of use, but it also makes sense to buy one brand of equipment as much as possible to ensure problem-free compatibility,” Kanemura said. “When you interconnect multiple brands and problems occur, it can be difficult to troubleshoot and fix subtle incompatibility issues; especially for volunteers who don’t know what to look for.”

It also makes sense to always have an experienced AV person supervising each and every church broadcast, so that the volunteers have someone to turn to when things go wrong. The presence of this expert will also keep everyone else from panicking and making things worse during live events.

Consider Using a Third-Party Distributor

Any church can buy the necessary streaming/storage equipment and web connectivity to serve their broadcast ministry directly to congregants online. When the viewing platform is simply Facebook and/or YouTube, doing this in-house is relatively simple. But when the playout options become more varied and complicated – such as provisioning on-demand services to viewers worldwide – it can make sense to hire a third-party distributor to receive the church’s video stream directly and then handle everything else.

“The benefit of using a third-party service is its ability to aggregate and serve content to various services at the same time,” said Rose. “These services can also store and archive content for on-demand viewing. Now this is all possible without them but doing so in-house requires the church to buy expensive encoding hardware and a fast, reliable internet connection.”

The Bottom Line

When it comes to church broadcast ministries, “the options are wide ranging and budget dependent,” Rose told TFWM. This means that streaming/broadcasting worship services are now within the reach of churches large and small, and that the time to establish them in order to better serve congregants is now.