How to host a live webinar people register for

Decide where people watch

You can stream a webinar to the platforms your audience already uses, to a page of your own, or to both at once. Platforms bring reach: LinkedIn and YouTube put the session in front of people who follow you there. A page of your own brings the list of who signed up and who came.

On Lumbus every studio can have its own watch page: one link anyone opens in a browser, with no account and no app. Turn on registration and viewers give their name and email once before it plays; registration closes at the number you set, and you get the list of who came.

The watch page seats 100 people at once on Studio, 250 on Studio Plus, 500 on Studio Pro and 1,000 on Studio Max, with nothing extra charged for viewers. It is delivered by Lumbus, not by your studio, so a big audience never slows the broadcast, and when it is full, anyone arriving is told so and gets in when a place opens.

The week before: brand, slides and speakers

Load your brand once: a brand kit holds your logo, colours and lower-third style, so every speaker’s name appears the same way. Build the scenes the session needs: a title card, one speaker, two side by side, and the slides with a speaker beside them.

Upload the slides as a PDF. On air you turn the pages yourself, and the page on air follows a moment later. Save the whole set-up as a show, so the next session starts from this one.

Send each speaker their link the day before, not the week before: a link works for 24 hours. They open it in a browser, pick a camera and a microphone, and wait off screen until you bring them on.

The invitation

Put one link in every invitation: the watch page if you want registrations, or the platform’s event page if you are streaming there. Say what the session covers, how long it runs and who is speaking, and send the link again an hour before it starts.

If you stream to LinkedIn, set the live event up on LinkedIn as well, from the account that will go live, and paste its stream address and key into your studio. LinkedIn hands out a new address with each broadcast.

The hour before

Run the same checks every time. They take less time than restarting a broadcast.

• Bring every speaker on, one at a time, and watch their meter while they talk at their normal volume. Ask for headphones.
• Test every platform off air. A test with colour bars shows each key works before anyone is watching.
• Open the slides and check the first and the last page.
• Put a Starting soon scene up ten minutes before the start, so early arrivals know they are in the right place.
• Decide who answers questions in the chat while the speakers talk, and who watches the stream as a viewer.

On air: questions, polls and captions

Questions keep people watching. Comments from YouTube, Twitch and Kick arrive in one panel, and one tap puts a question on screen as a lower third while the speaker answers it. Comments on LinkedIn stay on LinkedIn, so ask a colleague to pass the good ones on.

Run a poll halfway through, answered on the watch page or in the chat, and show the result on screen. Live captions in eleven languages help anyone watching with the sound off.

Share your screen for a demo. If your connection drops, Be right back goes up on every platform and on the watch page, and Live comes back by itself when your signal returns.

The day after: the recording, the clips and the list

Download the programme as an MP4, or each speaker’s own track, for an edited version to send to people who registered and could not come. Trim the start and the end in the library if that is all it needs.

Lumbus finds the moments worth sharing and cuts them as clips, landscape or vertical, with subtitles, for the posts that promote the next session.

Then see who registered, and follow up while the session is still fresh in their minds.

Which plan suits a webinar

Pick by the size of the room and the number of speakers. Studio seats 100 on the watch page with four speakers on screen; Studio Plus 250 with six, and a second seat for a producer; Studio Pro 500 with eight, four seats and two cameras; Studio Max 1,000 with eight, twelve seats with roles and two studios at once.

Studio Pro and Studio Max can also stream a pre-recorded session at a time you set, for a webinar that runs again without you. Studio Pro is free for three days with eight hours on air and no card, enough to rehearse and run a first session.