It’s never been easier to live stream — all you need is a smartphone and an internet connection. But this low barrier of entry has led to a barrage of amateur broadcasts, causing audiences to develop a low tolerance for poor quality streams. When the pandemic hit, many houses of worship started live streams to continue offering services to their community. But these streams don’t match the high-quality broadcasts that most viewers expect. No matter how important your message is, it won’t be heard unless it is well-told. Functional tech and high-quality video and audio go a long way to having your message heard.
For houses of worship, improving broadcast quality is crucial to building and maintaining a thriving community of believers. But this raises a key question — what can you do to improve broadcast quality? To answer this, we first need to explore the streaming challenges facing houses of worship.
The Broadcast Challenges Facing Houses of Worship
Online video delivery has grown rapidly over the last few years, with the live streaming industry growing by 49% in 2021 alone — as reported by Stream Hatchet. With so much video content available, organisations are winning audiences by broadcasting high-definition (HD) live streams.
Audiences increasingly expect to be provided with high-quality streams. As TechRadar reports, audience expectations for high-quality broadcasts are so high that most viewers abandon low-quality streams less than 90 seconds into viewing. The hallmarks of poor quality streams include laggy streams, recordings made from low-quality equipment, and presentation mistakes resulting from a lack of technical training.
Along with viewer preferences for higher-quality streams, houses of worship face another challenge that impacts streaming success: Zoom fatigue. With remote work becoming commonplace, viewers are spending more time attending online meetings. This ‘Zoom fatigue’ can be exhausting and impacts your audience’s drive to attend online services. To counter Zoom fatigue, offer engaging virtual services that don’t resemble ‘just another online meeting.’
Competition and audience expectations present a challenge for houses of worship that haven’t secured a high-quality streaming solution. To capture audiences, organisations need to boost their broadcast capabilities while improving how content is structured and presented. Let’s explore how.
Creating Engaging and High-quality Video Content
How do you create live streams that engage your congregation? The answer is to provide high-quality streams and viewing experiences. Here are three steps to improve how your video content is delivered and presented:
- Invest in better equipment - consider purchasing high-end professional video cameras with HD or higher capabilities. Your camera should be paired with lighting equipment to ensure excellent recordings. In a house of worship, sound is incredibly important. So investing in the right audio setup is as important as buying the right camera gear.
Once your've achieved high-quality sound, video, and lighting, try experimenting with additional cameras, cranes, booms, and including b-roll (secondary footage) in your broadcast. These improve viewing by enabling different angles and shot types.
- Secure a reliable and fast streaming service provider - your streaming service provider is responsible for distributing your video to your audience. Unreliable streaming architecture or services directly affect the quality of your video stream, resulting in your audience clicking away from poorly transmitted content.
Partnering with a reliable streaming service provider ensures that your videos are transmitted in a reliable, secure, and high-quality fashion.
- Focus on how content is presented - empower your message with stylish presentations and multimedia assets that capture audience attention. Like any good story, craft each presentation to have a beginning, a middle and an end.
To help your speakers present, share a checklist that unpacks recording best practices on using microphones, speaking to a camera, and engaging with online audiences. This will go a long way towards creating frictionless viewing experiences.
Broadcast High-quality Streams With Caton Technology
At Caton Technology, we provide next-generation high-quality video streaming, recording, encoding and decoding, and publishing solutions for houses of worship.
Our solutions and technology enable you to:
- Live stream broadcast-quality video and audio to thousands of congregations and congregants worldwide from anywhere, at any time.
- Connect your congregations on any device at high bandwidth, reliably, and with high security.
- Stream seminars to religious schools, universities, and other learning institutions.
- Easily create, edit, publish, and distribute video content from any location and for posting to social media, and your institutions’ video-on-demand system.
Are you looking to improve your broadcast quality? Click the button below to talk to a member of the Caton team. Let’s discuss how our video services and advanced video over IP technologies can help you overcome your unique challenges.
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