Since we’ve started livestreaming in 2014, we’ve used the Church Online Platform as our front-end.
While it’s been successful, we wonder if there are other alternatives.
Is anyone using anything other than ChOP and facebook to livestream?
I’m looking specifically for the front-end, “hosting” applications.
I assume this post is due to their brief outage this morning? 
It’s a factor in it for sure.
We love the functionality and understand they’re also under a huge load when lots of folks are using it. We’ve only had 2 outages in the past several years, but they’ve both been within the last couple months. I certainly don’t want to seem like it’s sour grapes or that we’re unhappy with the FREE service they provide to so many churches. I just wondered if there are alternative that should be on our radar.
If anyone has a self hosted version, it’d be worth considering even as a backup.
We’ve been using castr.io to feed YouTube but we’re transitioning to LivingAsOne which will send to YouTube and Facebook (beta) as well.
We use Stream Monkey. It has the functionality to send to Facebook Live, YouTube, and Vimeo or to have the feed hosted on your own website by embedding it on a webpage. We haven’t attempted to do multiple destinations (e.g. embedding on a web page on our own site and sending to Facebook Live) but I think it may be possible. They also have wonderful customer service (that actually helped us fix our stream this morning when some of our equipment went down) that respond promptly and are very well-informed. I don’t have pricing info because I’m IT and our AV ministry manages that account.
We are moving from Churchstreaming.tv to LivingAsOne and our first test was way successful. We have been on LivignAsOne for our streaming to our other campus and now will be using their web platform part too. We will still use ChurchOnline.org as they have fixed the errors as you should have seen in the letter they sent out right after the last issue. They are on the ball and not worth moving from IMHO.
Bill
You can get various live streaming applications in the market which can help to live stream videos within your organisation. On my personal experience I would recommend you to use Microsoft Stream, it is very easy to use and help you share videos with your organisation.
How do you like castr.io? Could you tell me what you like about their services?
Also, how do you like LivingAsOne? Why did you move to them instead?
What did you like about ChurchStreaming.tv? Why did you move to LivingAsOne? Have you liked LivingAsOne?
ChurchStreaming.tv was great for a long time but we started having issues with the broadcast to both our churchonline platform and facebook pausing and skipping and we could not have that continue. We knew it was not on our end because we tested other things so since we were on Living as One for our multisite we decided to move to them for web also. Only thing to get used to is the longer delay but it is worth it for better stream. Also we do not have to send them multiple bit rate streams like we did with Churchstreaming.tv we only send them a 1080p stream and they do all the transcoding
Can look at their Haivision’s KB Encoder series with Video Cloud Faith & Worship Video Streaming Services | Haivision.
We liked castr.io because we could send an RTMP stream to one place and have it redistributed to various places (YouTube & Facebook) and we could have multiple channels (campuses) on one account. We tried restream.io but we had to have a separate account per campus. We currently stream from 4 campuses to the internet. Also it’s cheap. We moved to LivingAsOne for reliability, quality, and being able to schedule streams. It also streams to YouTube / Facebook so it satisfies that requirement as well. Plus we wanted to have a player on our website / app that wasn’t YouTube in the event we get taken down by them for copyright issues, etc.
A little late to the party here, but does anyone know of a way to integrate chat specifically in another platform? We currently use LAO, which is great for the actual video feed, and I can embed it directly to our website if needed. The problem comes up in that I need a chat, program notes, and scheduling solution. The latter two are fairly simple, but the chat still perplexes me.
We use Livestream for any of our service content. I don’t believe we have ever had an issue with the service. It is used by many larger companies and I believe was recently acquired by Vimeo.