HD Broadcasting Options?

Ronald, I do not have direct experience. I did ask a friend who did and he said their church uses Livestream. Beware though Livestream's plans are incredibly confusing. It seems you have to login to their site and cannot embed it into your own page unless you buy the $399 monthly plan (I could be wrong).

He also mentioned Amazon Cloud Front though I don't think he has used it himself. It looks like you can do live streaming with it.

I am sure there will be other (better) responses.

you could check hiring some space on satellite channels?

You could perhaps make use of Youtube Live to stream ?

Hi Ronald, I concur with David Hansel that surveillance cameras would not be appropriate for your needs and it would be nice to use a few camera angles with a switcher if possible. Depending upon the budget, you could use anything from a low cost, consumer HD video camera with HDMI output or a more professional camera with better optics and either HDMI or SDI ouput. SDI has the advantage that you can run long cables up to 300 feet whereas HDMI can become unreliable when running cables over 7 feet. If you do use a camera with SDI output, make sure it outputs video with embedded audio. Some SDI cameras output their audio via a seperate analog or AES/EBU audio connection which is annoyingly cumbersome and creates unwanted technicalities.

I used to work for Blackmagic Design which makes uncompressed SDI and HDMI products for the film and broadcast industries. If you want to use several cameras, I suggest you take a look at their ATEM switchers. In particular, the ATEM Television Studio is great if you want to connect a few HDMI and HD-SDI cameras. The company's DeckLink and Intensity uncompressed capture cards can be used with streaming products, such as Telestream Wirecast and Apple's QuickTime Broadcaster, to capture the output of a camera or switcher for streaming to the internet. I hope this gives you a few more ideas. Regards, Luke.

Ronald -

I've been researching this very issue for my church (Riverbend, in Austin TX), though my project is not online just yet. The opportunity is to bring in live viewers of classes remotely, and to offer replays of some classes after the fact along with downloadable PDF files of any study materials. I installed a Video Insight VMS system there some years ago, so that's where I started.

From a technical point of view, the VI video server and Web Viewer client works well for streaming video and audio. Although there is sometimes a slight lip-syncing issue, it's not a real problem. VI has provided an API to embed the viewer in a web page (this is often done for customers like pet-sitting services, as you can imagine). I will update IPVM when we get back to the project and are ready for previews. As the overall production values are expected to be less important than the content, a single-camera setup is all that I am proposing.

The surprising complication, however, is the legal and licensing gotchas. It seems that the music (most modern music, every clip used to illustrate or intro a live sermon, and even more traditional tunes that you might expect) is covered by very restrictive rights and usage rules. What is fair game with a live audience becomes severly expensive when 'broadcast' over the internet. This explains why most television broadcasts from churches are cut down to just the speaking and none of the singing or other music. I hope, later, to offer online replays of the larger assemblies, using the same VI video server to stream mixed television programming, albeit without the licensed material.