Last updated November 18, 2009

Introduction

Churches, especially ones under 500 members, often want to broadcast their services online (both video and audio-only) but don’t have the technical knowledge to know what it takes. Here’s how we set up a live internet streaming system at my home church, the Hockinson Apostolic Lutheran Church.

What Hardware You Need to Buy

  1. Digital Video Camcorder – $200-300
    1. With firewire (IEEE 1394) capability and a good optical zoom (30x or higher)
    2. Sonys work best–we used a Sony Handycam mini-DV that cost around $250.00
  2. PC desktop or laptop computer – $300-500
    1. It should be fairly decent CPU (3.0 GHz+) and have 2 GB of RAM or more
    2. Plan on spending $300 to 500, including monitor/keyboard/mouse
    3. XP Home or Pro, Vista, or 7 all work
    4. Newegg has a good section
  3. Firewire (1394) Add-on Card (if not built-in to the PC already) – $10-15
  4. Firewire Cord – $8-15 
    1. 4 pin to 6 pin 6′ usually works
    2. Walmart has cheap ones
  5. Camcorder Tripod – $50-150
    1. Don’t buy too cheap and light of one or you’ll get very jerky movements
    2. Walmart has a decent selection

Monthly Costs

  1. Internet Connection – $30-65/month
    1. DSL or Cable – good upload speed (512kb or better) is important
    2. Static IP is highly recommended – usually $5/month additional. If you don’t get a static IP the streaming host will have to use a dynamic IP service like DynDNS.org to know where to find your stream. This can be buggy and not always work.
  2. Internet Streaming Host – $50 to 120/month
    1. Abacast is highly preferred as they have the best customer service of the ones we tried
    2. Monthly cost is based on usage.
    3. Mount points are basically connection points where you to send the stream and where people connect in. Like a central hub. This way you can send a single internet feed that is then multiplied among many people without bogging down your system.
    4. If only doing video, you will only need one “mount point” — with audio-only and audio/video you will need two. Audio-only is considerably cheaper than video, since it uses less bandwidth.

Setup

  1. Install the Firewire add-on card onto the PC if not already there
  2. Start up and set up the PC as you would any normal computer
  3. Install the free Windows Media Encoder 9 on the PC and then turn the PC off
  4. Set up the camcorder
    1. You don’t need a tape in the camcorder
    2. Connect the firewire card to the video camcorder via the firewire cable
    3. Connect the camcorder to a power outlet (the battery will go dead otherwise)
    4. Put the camcorder on the tripod
  5. Turn on the PC and the camcorder
  6. Start up Windows Media Encoder 9
    1. I’ll add settings for WME9 here later, but it shouldn’t be too difficult to figure it out
    2. Abacast should have given you some directions on setup
  7. Add a link to the Abacast stream to your church website

That’s pretty much it. To archive video use the built-in recorder in Windows Media Encoder 9 under the Output tab in the Properties panel.

Please contact me if you’re confused or if some directions are unclear or erroneous. I get a lot of traffic to this page and I want to continue to improve it to help people out.