A webinar is a broadcast with a door on it: a handful of presenters on camera, a large audience watching, and a register deciding who gets in. Devotel Orbit ships that shape as a scheduled video room with a registration gate in front of it. This guide walks one event end to end, from choosing the shape to the follow-up message after the recording lands.
When a webinar beats a 1:1 room
Video rooms come in three shapes, and the wrong one is expensive to fake. A 1:1 room is two publishers; a small group is 2 to 12; a broadcast is a handful of publishers in front of an arbitrary number of receive-only viewers. Scaling a video room: from 1:1 to broadcast grades the three topologies, and the short version for event planners is that the broadcast shape scales on the subscriber side while the publish side stays fixed at your presenters.
The webinar layer adds what a plain room does not track: who registered, who you approved, who showed up, and who did not. Reach for it when the event has a lineup and you care who holds a seat: paid training, product launches, customer academies, analyst briefings. If an open guest link is fine, a plain room is the simpler tool.
Host setup
Open Voice → Video → Webinars in the dashboard and pick the scheduled room that will run as the webinar. The panel gives you the form settings, the registrant list, and the report in one place.
- Open the gate. Enable registration to start accepting sign-ups. Closing it later freezes the list while keeping existing registrants and their tokens.
- Turn on Require approval. New sign-ups then land as pending and stay out of the room until you approve them. With approval required, the join path also turns away people who are not on the register at all: an approval queue that strangers can walk around is no queue, so the enforcement shipped in the October 2026 release refuses unregistered guests with a register-first message, and the approved-attendee cap you set is what binds at the door.
- Set the approved-attendee cap. The capacity you configure is the number of approved seats. Approving someone past the cap is refused, so waitlist them or raise the cap first.
- Add custom questions. Up to 20 labelled questions, each optional or required, so the register carries the fields your follow-up needs (company, role, use case).
- Decide how closed the door is. The Registered participants only switch checks every join against the register, on both the authenticated join path and guest invite redemption. Require approval already refuses strangers; the switch makes the closed door explicit for rooms that run without an approval queue.
The same settings travel over the API: PUT /api/v1/video/rooms-scheduled/:id/registration takes enabled, require_approval, capacity, and custom_fields, so a webinar can be stood up from your own tooling.
The registrant lifecycle
Everyone who signs up lands in the room's registrant list with their name, email, answers, and a per-person join token. The registrants model tracks each person through the states your decisions move them between:
register → pending (when approval is required)
register → approved (no approval needed, capacity slot free)
register → waitlisted (no approval needed, capacity already full)
pending / waitlisted / declined → approved (you approve)
approved → declined / blocked / waitlisted (you re-decide)
approved → attended (check-in)Approve, decline, waitlist, or block one registrant at a time from the panel, or with PATCH /api/v1/video/rooms-scheduled/:id/registrants/:registrantId from your back end. A few behaviours matter operationally:
- Registration via API vs console is the same register. Your public sign-up form posts
POST /api/v1/video/rooms-scheduled/:id/registrantsthrough your server; the response carries that attendee's uniquejoin_token. The Add attendee button in the panel writes the same record, handy when a VIP emails you instead of filling the form. - Re-registering the same email returns 409, so a duplicate sign-up is caught at registration time, not at the door.
- A successful join checks the registrant in. The attended flip feeds the report's attendance figure, and repeat check-ins are idempotent, keeping the first timestamp.
- Removing a registrant invalidates their join token immediately. Orbit tracks attendance per registrant rather than policing devices, so if a join link gets forwarded, whoever uses it joins as that registrant and the seat counts once. When you need to cut a specific attendee off, removal is the lever, and it takes effect at once.
After the event, the report answers the question every host gets asked: registered vs approved vs attended vs no-shows, with the attendance rate as one panel instead of a spreadsheet.
What your audience sees
An approved registrant joins with their own token as a receive-only viewer: the presenters' video and audio, without a publish seat. That is the broadcast topology doing its job; the audience's bandwidth goes to receiving, not uploading. Panelists and hosts publish through the room's grant tiers, the same tiering the scaling guide walks through.
People who are not cleared see a specific refusal rather than a generic error:
| Who tries to join | What they get |
|---|---|
| Approved registrant | Admitted, checked in, seat counted against your cap |
| Pending or waitlisted registrant | A refusal explaining they are awaiting the host's approval |
| Unregistered guest, approval or the register gate on | A register-first prompt pointing them at your form |
| Approved, but every approved seat already claimed | An at-capacity message; raise the cap or waitlist someone to admit them |
| You, the host | Always admitted, so a closed room never locks out its organiser |
For a public mirror of the session, pair the room with egress. RTMP simulcast pushes the broadcast to a platform of your choice alongside the gated room, and HLS/DASH egress serves a web player for the audiences you do not gate at all. A common pattern is a gated room for the interactive audience and a public stream for the long tail, with the registrant report telling you who the interactive audience actually was.
Recording and post-webinar follow-up
The session recording lands with the transcript and participant list on the room's history, and shareable player links let you send the replay without hosting video yourself. The register is what makes the follow-up precise: you know who registered, who attended, and who no-showed, so the after-message can differ per group.
Orbit flows handle the send. A flow triggered after the event can branch on the report's segments and send the replay link to no-shows, a survey to attendees, and a reminder to the waitlist for the next session. The same SMS and WhatsApp survey pattern VoC teams use for support interactions works for post-webinar feedback, with responses landing back on the contact. Distributing join tokens before the event works the same way: the gate itself never places an outbound call or message, so your own channels (email, flows, your site) hand each registrant their token.
Frequently asked questions
How large can the audience get?
The audience joins receive-only, so the scaling variable is subscriber count while the publish side stays fixed at your presenters. The approved-attendee cap you set is a host control on the register, separate from the room's broadcast headroom.
Can panelists still publish while the audience is view-only?
Yes. Grant tiers put presenters on publish seats and the audience on receive-only joins; the tiers are minted into each join token.
What does an unregistered guest see with Require approval on?
They cannot join. The join screen shows a register-first prompt instead of admitting them as a walk-in guest, and pending registrants see an awaiting-approval message until you decide.
What if I approve more people than the cap?
Approving past the capacity ceiling is refused at decision time, so the over-capacity state has to come from lowering the cap after approvals. At join time, approved registrants claim seats until the cap is taken; a further approved joiner gets the at-capacity message until a slot frees or you raise the cap.
Can I simulcast the webinar to a public platform?
Yes. RTMP egress simulcasts the room to an external platform while the gated room runs, and HLS/DASH egress serves a browser player. The public mirror is your call; the register only governs the room.
Does Orbit send invites or reminders to registrants for me?
No. The gate is configuration and attendee management; it never places an outbound call or message. Hand out join tokens and reminders through your own email tool or flows, which keeps the sending under your compliance setup.
Published 13 October 2026.