Is anyone using streaming apps for Apple TV, Roku, Amazon Fire, etc? If so, did you develop your app in house or use a third party? We have been contemplating them for years and I wanted to get some feed back from those that may have them.
Our main stream provider is LiveStream and all of our post-production is on Vimeo.
We are considering moving to the Living as One Web Platform once they get the Facebook Live integration since we already use them for our simulcast.
We’re gearing up for a move to churchstreaming.tv. Their OTT apps (Roku and AppleTV) are worth the cost of the monthly service. Plus, if you pay for a year at once, they’ll throw in a license to Wirecast, which is a phenomenal software. They have a free 30-day trial. Last I knew, @Jason.Lee over at northwoods.church was using them.
This is true.
We’ve looked at LAO for web streaming and it looks to be a solid option, but we do have quite a bit invested in the workflow for CSTV to publish live and to our archives including OTT… so changing would be painful and but having h.265 would be nice.
How many streams are you sending to ChurchStreaming.tv? We currently use LiveStream.com and we use their producer on a Mac and send 3 streams (HD, medium, mobile) to get the playback quality we are looking for on our website. We are wanting Apple TV and Roku apps and this might be the way to go. We looked at them 3-4 years ago and their quality wasn’t what we wanted so we ended up with LiveStream.
We are sending 3 bitrates to CSTV from wirecast HD, Medium and Mobile.
You mentioned work flows built in with churchstreaming.tv. Are you using using the Church Online Platform by chance? That is something we have considered integrating with as well.
If you use Roku’s direct publisher it will be alot faster to deploy and easier to maintain. Just need to provide the xml feed. Using the direct publisher means you don’t need to code and update the app package every time there is major change on Roku platform.
how or where do we get started with this direct publisher to roku? we have been trying to get our live streams to work on roku for months now, they say it cant be done.
ChurchStreaming.TV includes a Roku app in their service. Northwoods.Church has a great Roku app. That’s @Jason.Lee’s church.
You need to generate the XML feed for Direct Publisher to use.
Check out this link that details the feed specs:
Usually the platform that hosts the videos can provide the Roku feed.
In order to do rhese things would require a paid service such as sunday streams? Maybe that’s where we are going wrong. Hes trying to go low/ no cost. I would think there would be a way to do it.
We started with FaceBook Live via an iPad. That was less than ideal, but it works - audio was the biggest issue; people near the iPad were often more present than content from the service.
We now use a camcorder (with decent optical zoom a member donated) with a black magic HDMI to thunderbolt converter to a Mac Mini running OBS studio. OBS studio handles all the transcoding to send to Facebook - it works a treat (other than having to deal with Facebook - not a fan but it works and is free). We also have a send from our soundboard to the Mini so the audio is super clean and free of audience noise (or us talking in the booth as sometimes happened with the iPad was in the booth with us). OBS Studio handles all that. We tried a few different Windows PCs and kept having random issues, especially after Windows updates - since moving it to the Mac it’s been flawless.
We also use the awkwardly named Newtek NDI Scan Converter, part of the free NDI tools, to send a stream of what Pro Presenter displays at the front of our auditorium to OBS studio and in OBS Studio we have it as a picture in picture in the corner so there’s a clear version of the slides along with a view of the stage. We also save a local recording if we want to have something better than what Facebook saves automatically. I just wish I could stream to Facebook and also stream RTSP from OBS studio to also have that view in other parts of the building - for the nursery workers, people in the kitchen working on prep, etc. There may be a way to do it, I just haven’t had time to dig and see.
BTW - NDI is awesome. I’m never buying anything but cameras that can speak NDI natively. Analog/HDMI is dead to me (hooray!) Thankfully NDI seems to be taking off, there are quite a few - especially in the PTZ (point/zoom) side of things now and the premiums they used to command vs other cameras are slowly disappearing. If they just had an inexpensive device that could display an NDIS stream - like a chrome or fire stick but for NDI - then I could ditch RTSP for internal use too.