Live-streaming the ceremony?

Definitely have someone (not you or your future spouse ) be in charge of the livestream.

Yes! my sister had a livestream for her wedding. They hired/bought some equipment and then asked a tech savvy friend of theirs to monitor it.

We looked into this and originally asked my BIL to monitor, but we discovered it was quite difficult and would have ended up costing almost as much as just hiring a livestream person, so that's what we did. It's a lot less than a videographer since it's a static camera, and they don't have to follow you around anywhere. We thought it was worth the $500AUD or so it has cost.

When we were looking them up, you could actually watch other streams! It was wild, they had weddings and funerals and amateur sports games... we looked at a few to get an idea of the quality and they were really good! So, maybe look into that?

My husband and I livestreamed our wedding after deciding to downsize from 80 to 46. We used Eventlive. We hired a man who worked closely with our photography team to do it it for our ceremony since he had recently began offering livestream services. He used a ring light and a cellphone in the middle. He setup just behind the groomsmen so viewers had a great angle of everything. The thing about livestream is it will record and allow your guests to view in real times you just need good stable WiFi. I loved eventlive because it offered a playback of what’s been recorded even if its still being live-streamed guests could rewind. We still have access to the playback now and its 3 months later. For the reception my maid of honor’s boyfriend did it for us at the last minute because the first guy was too pricey just for the ceremony and my maid of honor’s boyfriend was so amazing you would have thought he was a professional. He brought his tripod and would move it around to get different angles for us. He live-streamed our entrances, first dance, parent dances, shoe game, toasts, cake cutting, and bouquet toss. Eventlive would notify guests whenever we were back online and they could view live or watch the playback. Also when you watch the playback it shows as one smooth video. You don’t see the times you went off line and stopped recording it blends everything together for one nice video. We had 60 or so guests viewing live and maybe 30 watching the playback. Eventlive also gave our guest a guestbook and it was so nice to see their comments and have them as a keepsake. It really worked well for us.

We did a livestream component since a lot of guests were unable to fly in. The app we used was Lovecast. They have a basic free option for ceremony only (which is what we used) and an upgrade version for full day with additional features I believe. All versions come with a stream test which we did day of. We just had a spare cell phone set up on a tripod off to the side with the app pulled up and ready for our coordinator to press start when ceremony was about to begin. I think it worked pretty well, but the problem we ended up having with it was that our ceremony was outdoors and the venue wifi didn’t reach it so we had to rely on cellular data. As a result our stream did cut out the remaining 1/3 of the ceremony. However if you have reliable wifi I don’t think that would be an issue. Make sure to have a microphone during the ceremony for any recordings or stream that you do!