Live Streaming Websites: Five Levels, From Free to Fully Custom

So you're streaming. Nice.

Maybe it's your worship services, Friday night football, a city council meeting, or a company all-hands meeting. Whatever the event, sooner or later you run into the same question: where should your stream actually live? In other words, once you’ve figured out how to output a reliable stream that delivers great quality, the next most important thing is to ensure that you’re sending your stream to the best primary location possible to meaningfully connect with your online audience.

Your answer will depend on three core things: cost, complexity, and what you need your stream to accomplish. On one hand, a free option can be perfect for one organization and a dead end for another. On the other hand, a premium hosting site may be overkill and take too much work for one company and totally make sense for another.

From our seat on the bus, we've helped thousands of organizations stream since 2013, and have seen just about every streaming site setup out there. So we decided to create this post and share a categorized list of live streaming websites available for you to use. Each of the five levels is intended to meet different needs depending on where you’re att, starting with free and working up to a fully branded app on your viewers' TVs. For each level, we'll cover what it costs, how much work it takes, and what it means for ownership, control, monetization, and analytics.

If you just want the short version, start here:

Table of Contents 

Level 1: Free live streaming websites
Level 2: Your legacy website
Level 3: A next-gen website built around live video
Level 4: A custom website from a design agency
Level 5: A custom OTT app for smart TVs and mobile
Final Thoughts

Level 1: Free live streaming websites

Anybody can stream straight to YouTube or Facebook (or another spot like Instagram or Twitch, if that's where your community hangs out). If funds are an issue, the good thing is that these options don’t cost a dime. Plus, if your viewers already have the apps, discovery is built in, and many platforms keep a recording when you're done for later viewing.

For a lot of streamers, free works, especially at the beginning. If you're a solo creator, a small team, or a group whose audience already spends hours on YouTube every week, Level 1 might be all you ever need.

The tradeoffs and drawbacks get bigger as your stream gets more important, though…

Reach is focused but limited. If someone isn't on Facebook or doesn't want to log in, your stream gets harder to find. And your 90-minute service or two-hour game is sitting in a feed built to move people along to the next thing within a minute or two, so these platforms aren’t always ideal for long-form content.

Control is out of your hands. Even when you have the right music license, automated copyright systems can flag a live stream and mute or stop it mid-broadcast. Sorting it out afterward isn’t really an option, and even if it were, it wouldn't help the people who were watching live only to have the broadcast cut off indefinitely.

Advertisements are a real risk. 60-second political ads that focus on shocking subjects, or other adult-themed content can interrupt your broadcasts, and if there are little eyes and ears watching, there’s not really anything you can do about it.

Analytics stay high level. You'll get views and watch time, but not much about who your viewers are, making it harder to know who to engage with after an important event that requires feedback and follow-up.

Overall, “social only” is a solid option if you need something basic and free. It's probably not the best long-term home for a stream your organization depends on, though. The good news is you don't have to pick. Most streaming platforms, like ours, let you simulcast to YouTube and Facebook as secondary destinations while sending the same stream to additional (and more optional) locations of your choosing.

Level 2: Your legacy website

Ah, your trusty old website. Like your favorite car that just surpassed 200,000 miles, it's been there for years, it mostly does its job, and at the end of the day it just works. Sure, the day will come when you’ll need to replace it, but you want to ride it for as long as you can.

Many organizations already have a site built on a traditional content management system like WordPress, Wix, or Squarespace. Adding a stream usually means copying an embed code and pasting it onto a page, which takes about 10 minutes… as long as you have the login credentials handy.

Cost is usually low, too: a monthly plan or hosting bill, plus whatever premium themes or plugins you've picked up along the way. The catch is that these sites were built to hold pages with text and images, not to be an ideal home for live video.

Templates can box you in, so getting a live player, a schedule of upcoming streams, and a library of past ones to sit nicely together often takes plugins, workarounds, or a developer. And all of this can unfortunately get complicated fast.

WordPress sites in particular lean on plugins, and most WordPress security problems trace back to plugins and themes that fell behind on updates. And a page that loads every slider, script, and widget at once doesn't do your video player any favors, especially on a phone.

This is also the level where you need to decide what's actually playing the video. What's inside the embed matters as much as the site around it.

A dedicated streaming platform like BoxCast gives you an ad-free player you control, a schedule of upcoming and past broadcasts on your site, simulcasting to YouTube and Facebook at the same time, analytics on who's watching and where, and options like ticketing and donations if you want to monetize. It does cost money, so it's worth comparing plans against what you'd get for free.

Overall, Level 2 is a real step up from social only, especially when the player is one you control. It's also where a lot of organizations stay longer than they should, because the site technically still works.

Level 3: A next-gen website built around live video

Newer websites are often built on modern frameworks like Next.js, or with a headless CMS that keeps your content separate from the design that displays it. Or put in more plain language, each page only loads what it needs. That usually means faster pages, smoother video, and less exposed machinery for anyone to mess with.

Though some next-gen websites require a technical expert to setup, others are actually built for non-technical people to build a site from scratch through drag and drop functionality.

BoxCast Sites was built for exactly that. It's included with every BoxCast Streaming plan, so if you already stream with us, there's no extra charge for an optimal site for your stream. Pick a template, drag your content where you want it, and every live, upcoming, and past broadcast will show up right on the site. You can connect your own domain, add a giving tool, and let the site handle image optimization for faster load times.

If you'd rather not move your old site over yourself, our team will migrate it for a one-time $149 setup fee. Or, if you'd rather do it yourself, that fee goes away. Additionally, because the site and the stream come from the same place, you own the domain and the viewer experience, and you're not juggling separate tools to keep the two in sync.

Overall, for most organizations, this level probably offers the best balance of cost, complexity, and results on the list.

Level 4: A custom website from a design agency

Then there are the websites you land on and immediately wonder who made them because they’re so unique and well done.

These types of sites are almost always built by design and engineering studios that live on the cutting edge and know how to make your message pop. They'll build out a brand system, plan a sitemap around how your audience actually moves through it, and design custom pages, including one where your stream should be to get the most stream viewership possible.

A quick shoutout to our friends at strideUX. They're a Midwest-based agency that handles branding, web design, and development, and they've built some of the most polished sites out there. If you want your stream to have the best possible place to shine, and you’re looking to go beyond drag and drop to a custom consultant, they're worth a call.

The tradeoff, of course, is cost. Custom work like this is usually the biggest upfront investment on the list, often running from thousands to tens of thousands of dollars. For some orgs, this fits in the budget and so it’s a no-brainer. The upside is that the hard parts are handled for you, your site will look absolutely incredible, and you own all of it.

Overall, if your website is a core piece of your brand, this is the top of the website ladder.

P.S. If you get in touch with strideUX, tell them BoxCast sent you and they’ll likely be able to sweeten the deal!

Level 5: A custom OTT app for smart TVs and mobile

Your audience already knows how to open Netflix on their TV. Level 5 puts you on the same TV screen as these major streaming apps, like, for real.

An OTT app (short for "over the top") is your own branded streaming app, built in the style of Prime Video or Disney+. With BoxCast OTT Apps, that means web, iOS, Android, Apple TV, and Roku apps with your logo and colors, set up in an intuitive no-code builder.

What makes this level different is that it's a whole ecosystem, not just a page on a website. Live streams and on-demand videos live together in organized collections. Viewers can create accounts, save favorites, and build watchlists. And you pick the business model: keep everything free, sell pay-per-view access to individual events, or offer subscriptions.

That's a big deal for athletics programs selling access to games, but it works just as well for a church that wants every past sermon one click away on the living room TV.

There are a few tradeoffs. It's an app, so people have to download it, which makes it a great companion to your website rather than a replacement. You'll also want someone keeping the library organized. And it's a paid product, though you can use it with or without a BoxCast Streaming plan, and the price is honestly way less than you’d probably guess.

In return, you get the most ownership on this list: your brand, your viewers, your pricing, and your data.

Overall, if you want people watching your content the same way they watch everything else, this is likely the strongest option on the list.

Final Thoughts

That's a lot of different options, and of course, there’s no right or wrong option, depending on your individual context.

A lot of people get hung up on cost when it comes to technology, and that's fair. But the jump between levels is often smaller than it looks. BoxCast Sites is included with every Streaming plan, and an OTT app through BoxCast typically costs a fraction of building one from scratch.

You also don't have to pick just one. The organizations we see reaching the most people tend to stack them: a stream simulcast to YouTube and Facebook, embedded on a website they own, and available in an app on the living room TV.

So start where it makes sense today. If free is the right call right now, go for it. When you're ready to move up a level, take a look at our plans or reach out, and we'll help you figure out what fits.

Thanks for reading, and happy streaming!