Bridgeway Church uses Epiphan Webcaster X1 to Stream Live to Facebook
Simple, easy-to-use Facebook Live Streaming for Worship
See how Bridgeway Church uses Webcaster X1 to broadcast their Sunday services live to Facebook.
Bridgeway Church is a non-denominational worship centre in Greenville, South Carolina. In 2016 they began a journey towards live streaming Sunday worship services to their congregation of 1000+ members. Their goal was to provide something inclusive for members who couldn’t join in person due to travel or sickness.
Getting started with live streaming
For the first six months, Bridgeway used a paid CDN service for live streaming. Soon after, their Pastor of Development, David Sisson, and his colleagues wanted to also take advantage of the newly available YouTube Live and Facebook Live services. They started by adding a YouTube RTMP stream to their streaming software. Although this process worked well, they wanted a simpler solution for streaming to Facebook. Specifically, with so many other moving parts involved in their live broadcasts, they wanted something they could just plug in and start streaming on without the need to manage more cumbersome RTMP stream keys.Live streaming to Facebook, the easy way 
The Bridgeway team searched Google and B&H Photo for encoders that work with Facebook and found Webcaster X1 for Facebook Live. Now, with a simple HDMI video feed to Webcaster X1, viewers on Facebook get the full benefit of the professional AV stream. The Facebook Live stream automatically gets the same live, multi-camera production that their software is streaming out to YouTube.
What does the end-to-end solution look like?
Bridgeway’s live streaming production solution uses video feeds from multiple cameras and an audio feed coming in from their mixing panel. They use Livestream Studio software to produce and switch their show and stream to YouTube. Using a BlackMagic Decklink Quad in their studio computer, Bridgeway outputs their video stream over SDI, then converts this signal to HDMI before connecting it to Webcaster X1 for Facebook Live.
After completing the simple one-time authentication to pair Webcaster X1 with their Facebook account and choosing their Facebook page as the streaming destination, the Bridgeway Church broadcast team finds that week to week there is very little set up to do: the live stream to Facebook just works. Every Sunday before the 9:00 am and 11:00 am services, the broadcast team uses a monitor, keyboard, and mouse connected to Webcaster X1 to set the description for the day’s live stream. When configuration is complete, they simply click start when it’s time to go live.
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