Solution
Sermon Video Hosting Built for Worship
Most ministries need one thing first: last Sunday's sermon on your own website, findable a year later, without an unrelated video appearing beside it. That is the archive, and it is the ordinary on-demand workflow. Live streaming, recording the service and restricting who can watch are separate paths — each genuinely useful, each optional, and each depending on your plan or your project settings rather than coming as one bundle.
Your service, on your own page
Start here
The archive is the part everyone needs
Before any question about live streaming, this is the workflow that carries the week.
A sermon is uploaded, given a title and a place in your library, and embedded on a page of your own website. The surrounding page is yours, so what sits beside the sermon is whatever you put there — the readings, the notes, the giving link — rather than whatever an algorithm chose.
That workflow is the same in week one and week two hundred, and it is deliberately unglamorous. The value shows up later: a congregation that can find a sermon from eighteen months ago, on a page you control, without the archive turning into a folder of files nobody can search.
The optional paths
Three things to consider separately
Each is available on its own terms rather than as part of a bundle, so weigh each against what your ministry will actually use.
Live streaming the service
A standard RTMP encoder points at your ingest endpoint and the congregation watches over HLS. Worth deciding early: encrypted live playback is not available, and live access control is a different mechanism from on-demand. Rehearse from the actual building, on the actual connection.
Recording what you broadcast
Recording a live stream is opt-in per stream and depends on your plan carrying it. When enabled, the service is captured into the project you choose — it is not automatic, and it is not published as a finished on-demand video the moment the stream ends.
Restricting who can watch
For material that should not be public — a members' meeting, a safeguarding session — encryption is an account entitlement plus a per-project setting applied at processing time, origin rules govern which pages an embed may load on, and a managed private link can carry an expiry or play limit and be revoked. None of it prevents someone recording their screen.
Practical
Getting a sermon archive running
Four steps a volunteer can carry, in the order that avoids rework later.
- 01
Decide the shape before uploading anything
- 02
Publish one sermon end to end
- 03
Add the optional paths only if you need them
- 04
Check what the reporting will and will not tell you
Common questions
Sermon hosting questions
Answered with the plan and configuration conditions attached.
Is live streaming included with sermon hosting?
It is a separate path rather than part of a bundle, and what your plan carries is recorded on the plan card. An earlier version of this page said every plan included live streaming, encryption, channels and the player; that was wrong and has been removed. Read the current inclusions on the pricing page, and if live decides your purchase, ask us to confirm it in writing before you commit.
Can we record the service automatically?
Recording a live stream is opt-in per stream and depends on your plan including it, so nothing is recorded unless someone turned it on for that broadcast. When it is enabled the service is captured into the project you select, rather than appearing as a finished on-demand video the moment you stop streaming. If the recording matters more than the broadcast, confirm both the entitlement and the destination project before the first service.
Can we keep some videos private to our members?
There are three mechanisms and they have real conditions. Encryption is an account entitlement plus a per-project setting that applies to material processed after it is switched on, so it does not reach back over an existing archive. Origin rules govern which pages an embed may load on, and are unrestricted if the allowlist is empty. A managed private link can carry an expiry or a play limit and be revoked. None of them stops someone recording their screen, and if a safeguarding requirement depends on the answer, get it in writing rather than inferring it from this page.
Will adverts appear on our sermons?
The sermon is embedded in a page of your own website, so what appears around it is whatever your ministry puts there. We are not going to make a broader promise than that on this page, because the structural point is the one that matters: the page belongs to you rather than to a recommendation feed.
What will the analytics tell us about our congregation?
Aggregate figures only: plays, watch seconds and completion rate, grouped by dimensions such as country, device and date. There is no identified viewer and no per-person record, so it will show that a sermon held attention and never that a named member watched it. For a ministry that is usually the right boundary, and it is better known in advance than discovered when someone asks for a list.
Put this on your own pages, under your own rules
Start with the archive on your own website, add the live and protection paths only where you need them, and confirm any inclusion that decides the purchase.