How to live stream a church service

What you need to start

Start with what the church already has. Each part can be improved later without changing the rest.

• A camera. A phone on a stand, a webcam on a laptop, or a camera with HDMI through a capture card into a laptop. One wide shot of the front is enough for a first service.
• The sound. A feed from your sound desk into the laptop, through the capture card or an audio interface, rather than a microphone in the room.
• A connection. A cable to the router if you can run one, the building’s Wi-Fi if you cannot, and a second way out for when it fails.
• A studio. Somewhere that takes the camera and the sound, adds your church’s name and slides, records, and sends the service to YouTube, Facebook and anywhere else at once.

Get the sound right first

People at home forgive a soft picture. They will not stay for a sermon they cannot hear. Take the sound from the desk, not from a microphone near the camera, which hears the room’s echo, the coughs and the air conditioning louder than the pulpit.

If your desk has a spare output, give the stream its own mix. The mix in the building is set for a room full of people; someone listening on a phone needs the speech a little louder and the music a little softer.

In Lumbus a capture card that carries HDMI sound brings it with the picture when you pick the camera, and an audio interface shows up as a microphone you can pick. Every source has its own volume, mute, noise suppression and a live meter, so you see the level before anyone hears it.

Before the first service, check that your church’s music licence covers streaming, not only singing in the building. The two are often licensed separately.

One camera or two

One wide shot, steady and level, carries a whole service. Put the camera at the back or the side at about eye height, out of the walkway, and do not point it at a bright window, which turns the people in front of it into silhouettes.

A second camera lets you cut between the wide shot and the preacher. On Studio Pro and Studio Max a studio takes two cameras at once, shown on their own, side by side or one in the corner. Or keep the second as a backup that takes over by itself if the first stops sending.

When a camera plugs into a laptop, Lumbus says what it really sends, and if that is less than 1080p at 60 frames a second it says why, so you know before Sunday whether a different cable or capture card would help.

Send it everywhere your church watches

Most churches stream to YouTube and Facebook at once. Lumbus sends to 5 platforms at once on Studio and more on the plans above. One stream leaves the building and the copies are made in the cloud, so the second platform costs your connection nothing.

For members who use neither, every studio can have its own watch page: one link that anyone opens in a browser, with no account and no app. It seats 100 people at once on Studio, 250 on Studio Plus, 500 on Studio Pro and 1,000 on Studio Max.

Live captions in eleven languages help anyone who is hard of hearing or watching with the sound off: English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, Dutch, Japanese, Korean, Hindi and Turkish. Upload the order of service, the lyrics or the sermon slides as a PDF and turn the pages live.

Make Sunday a routine a volunteer can run

The service that streams well every week is the one that starts the same way every week. Set it up once and save it as a show: the scenes, the church’s name in a lower third, the platforms and the watch page, ready to start from next time.

Put a Starting soon scene up as people arrive, so anyone who joins early knows they are in the right place, and an Ending scene when the service closes.

Give the people who run it their own seats instead of one shared login: two on Studio Plus, four on Studio Pro and twelve on Studio Max, where roles decide who can do what. The Lumbus Live app puts the controls on a phone: scenes, Be right back, go live and end stream.

On a paid plan the studio can follow a schedule, waking before the service and resting after it, so nobody has to remember to start it.

When the building’s Wi-Fi gives out

Church Wi-Fi is usually shared with everyone in the building, and Sunday morning is when everyone is on it. Streamed straight to a platform, a drop freezes the picture, and if it lasts long enough many platforms end the broadcast.

With a studio in the cloud, the platforms are connected to the studio, not to the church. If your signal weakens, a Low bitrate scene goes up; if it goes, Be right back goes up on every platform by itself, and the service comes back on its own when the signal returns. Lumbus never ends a broadcast just because your connection disappears.

For a second way out, Studio Pro and Studio Max let a second source stand by and take over by itself: a phone filming the same service over its own mobile network keeps you on air if the building’s Wi-Fi fails. If your camera is a phone running the Lumbus Live app, Bond goes further and lets the phones beside it lend their connections at the same time: 2 on Studio, 4 on Studio Plus, 8 on Studio Pro and 14 on Studio Max.

After the service

Every service is recorded as it streams. Download it as an MP4 that opens in Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro, DaVinci Resolve or CapCut, trim the start and the end in the library, or make an audio file of the sermon for a podcast feed.

Recordings are kept while you subscribe, up to your plan’s storage: 50 GB on Studio, 150 GB on Studio Plus, 500 GB on Studio Pro and 1 TB on Studio Max. On Free each recording is kept 14 days, so download the ones you want to keep.

Lumbus also finds the moments worth sharing and cuts them as clips, landscape or vertical, with subtitles, ready for the church’s social channels during the week.

Which plan suits a church

Free has 2 hours live a month, enough for a trial run or one special service, with the Lumbus logo and our websites in a corner of the picture. A weekly service needs a paid plan, where live hours are unlimited for normal use and the logo comes off.

Studio covers one camera, 5 platforms, four guests on screen for a remote reading or a visiting speaker, and a watch page for 100. Studio Plus adds a second seat for a volunteer and 250 on the watch page. Studio Pro adds two cameras or a backup source, four seats, text alerts if something fails and 500 on the watch page.

To try the full set first, Studio Pro is free for three days with eight hours on air and no card. Start it on a Friday and it covers a rehearsal and Sunday’s service.