I am involved in webcasting the live services each weekend from my church: Lansdowne Baptist Church, Bournemouth, England.

The good news is that you can do most of this for free, assuming you have the necessary internet connection and hardware. There should be no ongoing costs.

We have a three camera setup, a feed from the data projection PC and live subtitling for song words and captions. Typically, each Sunday, there will be a team of six people involved.

We started webcasting using Justin.tv as our streaming provider. Their adverts were a bit intrusive, so we looked elsewhere and found Livestream.com to be quite suitable. Their embedded player is very configurable.

Both providers have free accounts that show small ads at the bottom of the screen. These can be closed easily and a ‘pro’ option is available from LiveStream which has no ads.

My next post will cover our hardware setup for the webcast.