Skip to main content

​
Registration-gated video webinars

A webinar on Orbit is a scheduled video room with a registration gate in front of it. Instead of handing every viewer the same open guest link, you publish a registration form, each attendee that signs up receives their own join token, and only the people you approve hold a working seat. You flip the gate on per room, and Orbit tracks the whole attendee lifecycle on that room: who registered, who you approved, declined, waitlisted, or blocked, who actually checked in on the day, and how the final numbers compare.

​
What the gate gives you

  1. Pick the room. Registration belongs to a single scheduled video room — choose which of your rooms runs as a webinar.
  2. Open the gate. Enable registration to start accepting sign-ups; close it any time to freeze the list while keeping existing registrants.
  3. Configure the form. Require approval, cap the number of approved attendees, and attach up to 20 custom questions (label, optional/required).
  4. Review registrants. Everyone who signs up lands in the room’s list with their name, email, answers, and a per-person join token.
  5. Decide each status. Approve, decline, waitlist, or block one registrant at a time. Approving over the capacity ceiling is refused, so move someone to the waitlist or raise the cap first.
  6. Check attendees in. Mark approved registrants as attended when they show up — on the day, or as a post-event tally.
  7. Read the report. Registered vs approved vs attended vs no-shows per room, so “how many of my 500 sign-ups actually showed” is one panel, not a spreadsheet.
One thing the gate does not do: it never places an outbound call or message. The whole surface is configuration and attendee management — you distribute each registrant’s join token through your own channels (your site, an email tool, or a direct request to the registrant with its unique token).

​
In the dashboard

Open Voice → Video → Webinars, pick a room from the selector, and the panel splits into:
  • Report — registered, approved (against your capacity), attended with the attendance rate, pending, and no-shows.
  • Registration tab — the form settings (open/close, approval toggle, capacity, custom questions) and the registrant list with per-row decisions, check-in, and join-token copy.
  • Simulive tab — optional pre-recorded-as-live playout for the same room.
Add a registrant manually from the Add attendee button — handy when a VIP emails you instead of filling in the form. If approval is required they land as pending; otherwise they are approved, or waitlisted when the capacity is full.

​
A registrant’s lifecycle

Every decision stamps decided_at and decided_by, and only an approved registrant can be checked in — repeat check-ins are idempotent and keep the first timestamp. Removing a registrant invalidates their join token immediately.

​
From the API

The Webinars panel sits on the Video API surface, under the scheduled-rooms prefix. Reads need the video:read scope; writes need video:write plus an owner, admin, or developer role (the same roles the dashboard panel grants).

​
Open the gate

All four fields are optional — send only what changed. Custom field keys must be URL-safe (letters, digits, -, and _). Closing the gate later is {"enabled": false} — registrants already on the list keep their tokens.

​
Register an attendee

A 201 returns the registrant record — including its unique join_token, which is the value you hand to that attendee. Re-registering the same email returns 409; skipping a required question returns 400 naming the question; a closed gate returns 409. Your own public sign-up form should post through your back end or an API key holding the video:write scope.

​
Read the gate (and the report)

attendance_rate is attended ÷ approved on a 0–1 scale; no_shows counts approved registrants who never checked in; capacity_remaining is null when the room is uncapped.

​
Decide, check in, remove

Approve over the capacity ceiling and you get 409 telling you to waitlist or raise the cap first. Check-in takes an empty body; a repeat check-in returns the registrant unchanged. DELETE on the same path removes the registrant and kills their token.

​
Webinar or plain room?

Reach for a plain video room when a meeting is fine with an open guest link and you don’t need to pre-screen attendees — see Video for the room layer itself (creation, join, recording, broadcast) and the Video meetings guide for untracked get-togethers. Reach for a webinar gate when the event has a lineup — paid training, product-launch broadcasts, customer academies — and you care who holds a seat: approval queues, capacity, check-in, and the attended-vs-registered audit. The gate layers on top of a normal scheduled room, and every room-level feature (recording, the lobby, moderators, grants) keeps working underneath it.