OBS and Church Streaming
The early days of the pandemic pushed a lot of churches into streaming out of necessity: no budget for a production team, no technical staff, and a congregation that suddenly couldn’t gather in person. But the need didn’t go away when things opened back up. There’s a whole generation that wants more than the Sunday-morning-only experience, and that isn’t a pandemic trend, it’s just how people expect to access content now.
People Want Connection
We live in a world with more content, marketing, and social media than any generation before us has had to process, and people have come to expect information delivered on their own schedule: on the go, at work, at home. They want their church available in real time and on demand. That’s not a compromise on the in-person experience, it’s an extension of it.
If the apostle Paul had access to social media, YouTube, and video editing, I have no doubt he’d have used every bit of it. He walked long distances and wrote letters by hand to spread a message; the tools we have now would have been an accelerant, not a distraction. Not every church has the budget or the technical know-how to build a streaming setup, though, so I’m starting a short series on how to get going. This first post isn’t an exhaustive how-to, just the basics to get you moving.
Enter OBS Studio
OBS Studio is a free, open-source video mixer that lets you build scenes and pull in multiple camera sources, audio sources, and media, all in one interface. It has a clean learning curve for what it does, and the price is right: free. Download it at obsproject.com. Pair it with a USB webcam and you can start producing content or recording a sermon right away. Most church soundboards can output 3.5mm audio, which plugs straight into the microphone jack on the PC or Mac running OBS. The quality won’t be broadcast-grade, but it’s more than enough to get a shoestring-budget church online.
If you already own a computer, a webcam and OBS Studio together will run you around $100. And when you’re not using that setup to stream a service, the same rig lets you produce content for Facebook, YouTube, and just about any other platform, without paying a hosting or streaming fee.
Step It Up a Notch
If you’ve got a little more budget and a computer with a GPU that can handle OBS Studio’s encoding well, look at a Blackmagic DeckLink Mini Recorder (around $125). It lets you ingest an HDMI video source into OBS at resolutions up to UltraHD, and it sets you up to add a proper video switcher and multiple cameras down the road.
OBS Studio itself is what gives you the polished final product: overlay graphics, transitions between sources, and scenes you can assign to hotkeys so switching between them is instant. It’s a legitimate way to level up a stream without taking on a monthly or annual fee, and there are hundreds of tutorials out there to take you from novice to comfortable fast. A few to start with:
