Live Streaming advice revisited

i have a brother-in-law that has contracted through boxcast a one-camera live stream.

he is doing it for his worship service.

no hiccups and all seem very pleased.

he is checking on rates.

from my research, boxcast has a proprietary hardware/software package.

they charge something like $100/month for their barebones one camera feed.

i'm not sure what their set-up/camera hardware fees are.

so, anyone ever work with boxcast?

stay well.

rob
smalltalk productions/nyc
 
rob, I had an account with Boxcast for about 2 years. Worked extremely well. They are very popular with churches. Several things they do differently:
1. They have 2 encoders, one with HDMI inputs and another one with SDI, HDMI. The simpler and less costly HDMI will take an input from a camera or a switcher. I always used a switcher. This takes the encoding off the computer, which can be a big plus.
2. latency is about 2 to 3 minutes. One of the results of this is that the home viewer doesn't have buffering problems.
3. Their tech support is great and very responsive. And you can get them on the phone!!! Big plus.
4. they have channels, which means is that I subscribed and then each of my clients I would set up a channel for. Then I would charge them extra for the streaming service.
5. Extra features, now with their higher level package can get auto captioning and simultaneous streaming (say 2 breakouts rooms going at the same time).
I did cancel my service last month due to the fact I was doing live events and streaming-recording them and that business has disappeared.

If you have more questions, I will answer. James
 
Thanks everyone for the help. Wanted to chime in on the outcome. We streamed 5 events that week and it all went well. I paid for the Dacast 3 month streaming service and they were a great company to help with setup and questions. We streamed the shows into an embedded player directly on the clients web sites. We ended up doing a simple 2 camera switch and then edited together a better finished video utilizing the additional cameras for the finished video. The clients were happy and said they want to do it again. Streaming certainly added more work to the equation and tension and this added work coupled with covid measures which greatly cut down on attendance skewed the work/profit ratio much worse than before but I'm thankful it worked out and I learned somethings too.
 
I've been hearing a lot about streamyard to distribute streams, but I haven't really look at them yet. Might be something for the future.
 
I've been hearing a lot about streamyard to distribute streams, but I haven't really look at them yet. Might be something for the future.

Though I'm happy with Dacast I would certainly consider others too. I suspect I will be doing more streaming as people seem to be wanting it more. If you just have a single job every once in a while then a lot of those paid plans don't really make financial sense. If you have streaming jobs every month that is another story. That's the deal I got into. I had 5 events in one month but nothing for 3 months after that.
 
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