I understand where you are coming from and really we do not like it. We stream with Ustream at our 24 hour TV Church station online.However when we considered the cost of ad-free streaming, it was much more than we were willing to budget for it. So we still stream and the viewer can ignore the ads. On Ustream, the ads only come up at the begining or when you refresh the page. At the moment, we are trying out Livestream because of some recent software incompatibilirties with Ustream Producer. Livestream seems better as the viewer can simply click the X to remove the ad at any time.
One more thing is that if the webpage where your stream is embedded is well optimized with the right keywords and your account at Ustream, Justin.tv or Livestream has all the right keywords, the ads are likely to be more closely related to the content of the video streams. On Ustream we often have ads for Pastor training courses showing up, or just plain neutral ads.
Also if you would like, I could help you include a pop-up window when you are all set that tells your viewers what to do when watching a stream.
On a final note, it does seem that the mobile versions of these streams do not contain interactive ads, so if most of your viewers are doing so on mobile devices, then you are in luck.
God's grace. D let me know if you need my help. My personal site is at www.mcneri.com/websites

I can pretty much echo the above. We switched to Livestream from Ustream as well, ours due to software issues. We just include a disclaimer about the ads. The ad-free alternatives are outside the modest budget of our church. BTW, Ustream has the best & most overall features.

We started playing with Livestream (then Mogulus) back at the first Geeks and God conference in 2008. Between then and now, we also forayed into cable TV, but decided that in our case, it didn't provide enough return on investment to continue, so we threw more resources into streaming. We're now using the paid plan and are very happy with the service.

Although I'm not on our video team, I've checked out Livestream's Procaster software and it's pretty cool. I sometimes wish we could take better advantage of some of the features it offers, but that's not as useful since we have a dedicated hardware video switcher for streaming.

We've also secured the necessary licensing (I think CCLI handles this) to broadcast the worship portions of our service. This license does not cover archival of music performances, so our video team takes down the automatic archives and puts up edited video containing only the sermon, then links that to the corresponding sermon podcast node on our Drupal website. Our license also does not cover displaying the lyrics on the live stream, so that's a little bit of a down side for our viewers.

For live viewing, we've embedded both the stream viewer and chat window on our website, and I was clever enough to nab a good short URL -- http://bit.ly/cclive -- for easy tweeting.

Our video team assigns Livestream moderator as one of their positions. Their job is to make sure that video and audio are good, inject a disclaimer slide whenever we're showing copyrighted video, and communicate with people in the chat window. It works out well that this can be a remote position. (My wife has even moderated on camping trips over the wifi hotspot on her Verizon iPhone.) Having a moderator is important, especially when there are problems and viewers need to know what's going on.

Micah

Hmm, I guess I need to reread the CCLI streaming license. I thought it covered archiving & displaying lyrics for a period of time.

Pastor Dale,

I could be wrong, or not understanding which license we have. All of that stuff gets handled by our video department, and I'm just the sound guy. Good advise to all, review your license agreements and don't take my word for details.

Micah

We are just starting up live streaming in the next month. And I'm going to test out the Youtube Live feature and see where that gets us. If you are a non-profit you can apply for a Youtube Nonprofit Memebership which gets you a couple cool things in addition to the ability to live stream for free. I don't know much outside of that because I'm still waiting for the final approval from Google. I'll update here when that passes through.

Benefits of using Youtube are that you can integrate it into Google+ and Google hangouts. I'm sure there are a few things that will raise its ugly head once I start testing stuff out.

We're waiting for our approval, too, especiallly now that livestream.com has eliminated its free plans from what I can see. But more than that, YouTube is just so much easier for people to find.

Very excited about this. I imagine Google is backlogged with churches clamoring for Apps access finally, so it'll likely be awhile.