Watching a Webinar
It behaves like a broadcast, on purpose.
What It Is
The watch page is a full-screen video and almost nothing else. No sidebar, no page furniture — and, for a pre-recorded session, no player controls at all.
An attendee cannot pause, rewind, skip ahead or drag a progress bar. That is deliberate, and it is the behaviour that generates the most questions.
Why It Matters
A session with a pause button is a video. A session without one is an event.
The point of an evergreen or Just-in-Time webinar is to feel like something happening rather than something available. People watch a broadcast to the end; they scrub through a video looking for the interesting bit and leave. Removing the controls is what makes the watch-time figures on your reports mean anything.
It also means your timed polls and offers land. An attendee who could skip would skip past them.
How It Works
During a session — evergreen or Just-in-Time — the controls are hidden entirely. The session plays from wherever it should be and runs to the end.
If someone joins late, they are dropped in at roughly the point the session would have reached, not at the beginning. A latecomer to a 2:15 slot arriving at 2:19 starts four minutes in. The position cannot be tampered with to jump near the end.
If they refresh, their position is remembered rather than restarting. An accidental reload does not cost them the session.
In replay, controls come back. Once the session is over, scrubbing is exactly what you want — so the replay is an ordinary video player.
A live webinar is different again: attendees are in Google Meet, with Meet's own controls, and none of the above applies.
Examples
An attendee asks why they cannot pause
Because the session is running as an event. Point them at the replay afterwards, where they can pause and rewind freely.
An attendee's connection drops mid-session
Reopening their link puts them back where they were rather than at the start.
An attendee wants to jump to the pricing section
They cannot during the session. This is the trade you are making: better watch-through, less convenience.
Info: If being able to pause matters more to you than watch-through — training material people work along with, for instance — the replay link is the one to share, not the watch link.
