The Life of a Webinar
Draft, scheduled, live, ended, archived.
What It Is
Every webinar carries a status, shown as a badge on the list. There are five: Draft, Scheduled, Live Now, Ended and Archived.
The status is not decoration. It decides whether the registration page works, whether the console will let you start, and what an attendee sees if they arrive at the wrong moment.
Why It Matters
The one that surprises people is Scheduled, because of what the button that produces it is called.
Go Live does not start a session. It prepares one: it creates the meeting space, arranges for the session to be recorded, and moves the webinar from Draft to Scheduled. The webinar only becomes Live Now later, when the conference is actually detected as having begun.
So pressing Go Live well before your start time is the correct thing to do, not a mistake — it is how the meeting link and the recording get set up.
How It Works
Draft. Where every webinar begins. You can edit everything; nothing is committed.
Scheduled. The webinar is ready and waiting. For a live session this is when the meeting space exists and the recording has been arranged. Pre-recorded webinars sit here too, since there is nothing to start.
Live Now. Set automatically once the conference is detected in progress. The badge pulses on the list so you can see at a glance that something is running.
Ended. The session is over. Registrations may still arrive, and whether they can watch a replay depends on how you configured it.
Archived. Out of the way without being deleted. The record, the attendance and the results all remain.
Examples
A live webinar on Thursday at 2pm
Draft while you build it. You press Go Live on Wednesday and it becomes Scheduled, with a meeting link ready to share. On Thursday, once the conference begins, it flips to Live Now by itself. Afterwards you close it out and it is Ended.
An evergreen webinar
Draft while you upload the video, then Scheduled once it is ready. It stays there — there is no Live Now for a recording, because every attendee starts their own viewing whenever they like.
Warning: A live webinar still runs if the recording cannot be arranged — the session goes ahead and the failure is logged rather than shown. If a recording matters to you, check that one exists afterwards rather than assuming.
