Adding Multimedia (Audio, Video, Photos, Live Streaming) to your Website

Multimedia files are great ways to enrich your website. From sermon recordings to live streams of the Divine services, to welcome messages inviting people to "Come and See", multimedia can be a game changer in attracting and connecting with your potential and current parishioners. 

Technically speaking, you can upload multimedia files directly to our hosting servers, but, in general, we do not recommend it. Audio and Video files are usually quite large. The large files can add up quickly when storage and bandwidth limitations are in play.

Instead, there are great third-party websites devoted to hosting various forms of multimedia, some of which are free, while others will cost you a reasonable amount of money. Once your content has been added to these other systems, you then can easily use the provided embed code so that the content appears on your website!

Please read on for best practices in using third-party systems for hosting photos, live streaming, video, and audio.

Photo Galleries

Individual images can certainly be uploaded directly to your website. We recommend you optimize any images before uploading them to your website.

For photo galleries, where you will be storing dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of images related to the life of your parish, we recommend using a photo hosting services, such as Flickr.

Live Streaming Video

Live Streaming should always be handled by a third party provider. We have a whole section of our support site devoted to Live Streaming solutions.

Video Hosting

For all video, we strongly recommend you use a service such as YouTube.com or Vimeo.com.

Audio Hosting

Here are a some services that you can use to host your audio files.

Dropbox

You can get 1-3GB of free storage depending on what is being offered. You can get 100GB for $10/mo. You can create a hyper-link on your website (like an archive) for a person to click; these can be played without any extra software on most internet browsers.

SoundCloud

SoundCloud offers both free and paid hosting plans and ready-to-use embed code to easily incorporate your audio files into your website.

Archive.org

Archive is an internet archival service that allows you to set up an account and upload files. Last I used it, it also came with a little bit of code so you can create an embeddable player on your site. 

Yourlisten.com

Yourlisten is a free audio hosting program. It allows you to easily share your files on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media, and also directly embed audio on your site.