Having edited videos for over 15 years, I wasn’t too nervous about doing “online church” when the pandemic first hit. I knew how to record our services ahead of time and make them look nice. My real fear was what kind of online service I would have to offer once we were back in-person. There simply wasn’t room in our budget for thousands of dollars worth of cameras and video studio gear—nor did I have enough trained tech volunteers to run it.
Fortunately, two weeks ago we stumbled across a miracle app that upgraded our livestream significantly. It’s called “Switcher Studio” and it works by wirelessly connecting to various Apple products, creating a multi-angled broadcast of our church service. We even set up the app to automatically switch cameras so that it could operate without any extra volunteer support.
Switcher Studio is not a perfect fix to the church-broadcasting world. It is, however, the most user-friendly, affordable, and seamless software I have come across. We now use it for broadcasting our church services, recording our JXN Cloudepisodes, and streaming our podcast interviews. All that’s required to get it up and working is an app subscription, fast internet, and a few borrowed iPhones from your congregants.
So if your church is in a similar situation as us, I’d highly suggest trying out the free trial of Switcher Studio and see if it can be an easy fix for you. While it may not make your stream super-professional, it may be a huge step forward and match your budget and tech knowledge.
We’re still learning how to make it all look nice and have installed some new stands for this upcoming week. We’re also trying to experiment with different room mics. But if you want a sample of how it looked this past week, you can check out these samples of our recent broadcasts:
Jamin Bradley 
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