Church Livestream Setup on Altar Live
Live streaming on Altar Live
Church livestream setup can be daunting. How do I do it? What kind of equipment do I need? Is this going to be sustainable? We are here to tell you that church livestream set up on Altar Live is easy and efficient. With a few simple steps, you will be on your way to hosting all sorts of Events.
Altar Live is an incredibly powerful platform that gives you the ability to hold meetings, open rooms, and engage in tables in a lobby. Altar Live is specifically designed for faith communities to stream and host interactive and engaging events and services. Our simple, intuitive platform gathers your people together online where they can worship together in watch parties, freely socialize at virtual tables together, and find private places to pray with each other.
But the real strength of the platform comes from how it handles your live streams in events.
From connecting to services like YouTube, Resi, Boxcast, Wirecast, OBS, and many others, to multistreaming out to multiple other services with one stream, to even streaming pre-recorded and premiering videos, Altar Live gives you a wealth of options to get your events out to the world!
In this tutorial, we're going to show you how to connect your live streams, how to connect your own RTMP servers, and how to multi stream directly from Altar Live.
Let's get started.
The Basics
Before your church livestream setup can happen, you first need to make sure you have an Event created! Altar Live Events are easy to create and we provide a number of tutorials, guides, as well as tips and tricks to help you. Head over to our other tutorials to learn more.
Okay, back to your church livestream setup!
To connect your stream, go to Step 4 of your event creation or edit. From here, you will be presented with all of the options available to you for your live streams or pre recorded videos. Select whether your stream is live or pre-recorded. Then, select where your video will be coming from.
We offer a number of different options here.
Connecting Your Stream
Let's start with connecting video players with Altar Live. This works for both live and pre-recorded Videos. Simply select any of these during your church livestream setup and paste the livestream link into the stream URL area. For specific instructions on how to create live or pre-recorded events in each of these platforms, simply visit the support article
A preview of the stream will appear below. Clicking the fell preview button will open a separate window that will show you what your live stream will look like inside of your community.
Your video feed will automatically begin to play when the event start time begins. You can also manually Go Live earlier.
Church livestream setup on Altar Live also gives you the ability to connect your RTMP streams to our platform. The primary role of RTMP is to enable the smooth transmission of audio, video, and data from a creating source to the output source. In this case, Altar Live is the creating source transmitting data to an output source such as Facebook, YouTube, and Vimeo. You can copy your RTMP credentials directly to Altar Live when you set up a new event. Altar Live makes this process very easy and streamlined.
Before we start, a couple of quick notes to keep in mind during your church livestream setup:
- You only have to connect via RTMP once. If you are connecting the same live stream source (i.e. OBS, Wirecast, etc) via RTMP every time you go live or schedule a feed in Altar Live, you only need to connect it once. Once Altar Live has been created as a destination via RTMP, you can select that destination from your stream source whenever you go live.
- Expect a ~2 minute delay from when you go live in your stream source to when the video feed appears in Altar Live. For example, if your event start time in Altar Live is set to begin at 10:30 AM, make sure that you begin the live feed at 10:29 AM from your stream source so that your audience doesn’t see an empty screen.
Also note that this option is unavailable unless you have a paid subscription to Altar Live.
To get started, click the Altar button in the stream selection area.
Copy and paste your Altar RTMP URL and Stream Key into your stream source (OBS, Wirecast, etc).
You also have the ability to multi stream your event to both Facebook and Youtube from Altar Live, meaning that you only need to send one stream to us, and our servers handle the rest of the work!
To do so, select the service you would like to stream to by clicking the slider during your church livestream setup. Paste the URL and Stream Key from your Facebook or YouTube accounts into the corresponding boxes. Follow through the rest of the options along the sidebar to publish or edit the rest of your event. And that's all there is to it! Now, your church livestream setup doesn’t have to be confusing. You can easily create, host, and facilitate an amazing event on Altar Live. Don’t worry if you need extra help! We have a multitude of resources and you can always visit our Help Center.
Final Thoughts
A church livestream setup doesn’t have to be a long, complicated process. With a church platform like Altar Live, anyone can easily create an engaging online church service that has the ability to bring people together regardless of location. The Altar Live team is honored to be able to provide video conferencing software, consulting & training for churches, and reach every person on the other side of the screen and create community online.
