Live Control Panel
The live control panel is the screen your team uses while a session runs. It puts the session's chat, the audience numbers and the controls for polls, offers and feedback on one page, all updating in real time. It works for a session in any status: before it starts, while it's live and during the replay.
Access: everyone on your team can open the live control panel and follow a session. Admins and moderators run the interactive parts: chat moderation, Q&A, polls, offers and feedback. Only admins can use Go Live and End Session.
Open the control panel
You can open the panel for any session from three places:
- Dashboard home: the Sessions section lists every session that is live, open or in replay, plus the next three scheduled ones. Click Live Panel on a session's card. See Dashboard Home & Schedule.
- Schedule: click a session in the calendar, then click Live Panel.
- Webinars → (your webinar) → Sessions: click Live Panel next to the session.
The panel opens full screen, without the dashboard sidebar. The arrow at the top left takes you back to the webinar.
What's on the screen
Top bar
From left to right, the top bar shows:
- The webinar title and the session's status (scheduled, open, live, replay or archived).
- Go Live or End Session, depending on the status (see Start and end a session).
- The tabs for the left column: Chat, Q&A (with the number of questions) and Stats.
- The live numbers: attendees online, the peak so far and the number of messages (see Read the numbers).
Left column
| Tab | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Chat | The session's chat, where your team can post, reply, react and moderate. See Chat & Moderation. |
| Q&A | Chat messages your team promoted to questions, grouped into unanswered, answered and dismissed. See Turn questions into Q&A. |
| Stats | The audience chart, the session's conversion funnels and the full viewer timeline. See Stats tab. |
Right column
| Widget | What it does |
|---|---|
| Poll | Shows the active poll with live results, opens the poll manager and the pop-out results window. See Polls. |
| Offer (or Offers) | Shows the offers linked to this session, lets you show or hide one, post it to the chat and follow its clicks. See Offers. |
| Feedback | Requests ratings from attendees and collects the responses. See Feedback & Testimonials. |
| Keywords | Counts chat messages that mention words you're watching. See Watch for keywords. |
| Blocked Words | Masks words you don't want repeated in the chat. See Block words. |
Drag the divider between the two columns to resize them. The panel remembers your layout in your browser.
What attendees see
Attendees follow the session in the live room of the attendee app (live.yourdomain.com). The live room shows the video from the session's Playback URL next to the chat (below the video on phones). The chat header shows the attendee's name and an online count. When your team turns them on, a poll window, a feedback window and an offer banner appear in the chat area.
The Romanian texts attendees see are quoted on each feature's page. How attendees register and reach the live room is covered in Registration & Attendee Experience. The video and the session dates are set on the session, see Sessions & Lifecycle.
Start and end a session
A session starts and ends on its own, following the dates set on it: it becomes live when its Live Starts At time passes and moves to replay when its Live Ends At time passes. These status changes are checked periodically, so they can happen a few minutes after the exact time. The full lifecycle is described in Sessions & Lifecycle.
Going live sends the "starting now" notifications and moving to replay sends the "replay available" notifications, on the channels you've turned on in Email Notifications, SMS Notifications and Push Notifications. Each is sent once per session.
Admins can also start or end a session by hand from the control panel.
Start early with Go Live
The Go Live button appears while the session's status is open, that is, after its Featured From time and before it goes live.
- Click Go Live.
- Confirm.
The session's status changes to live and its Live Starts At time is set to the current moment, so the attendee app treats the session as started from now on. The "starting now" notifications go out at this point and aren't sent again when the originally scheduled time arrives.
End with End Session
The End Session button appears while the session's status is live.
- Click End Session.
- Confirm.
The session's status changes to replay, its Live Ends At time is set to the current moment and the "replay available" notifications go out.
Which notifications a manual Go Live or End Session sends differs slightly from the automatic change; see Start or end a session early.
End Session doesn't stop your video
The platform doesn't control your broadcast. End the stream in your streaming tool. Attendees in the live room keep seeing whatever the session's Playback URL plays.
Running past the end time
If you're still broadcasting when Live Ends At passes, the session moves to replay anyway and the replay notifications go out. If you expect to run late, move Live Ends At in the session's settings before it passes.
Moderators and Go Live
Moderators also see Go Live and End Session, but the change is rejected for them because it edits the session. Ask an admin, or let the session's dates start and end it.
What stays on after the live ends
The chat stays open during the replay: replay viewers see the same chat and can post in it. Polls, offers and the feedback form also stay on until someone on your team turns them off. Ending the session doesn't close them, so turn off anything you don't want replay viewers to see.
Read the numbers
The top bar shows these numbers, updated in real time:
| Number | What it counts |
|---|---|
| online | Attendees who have the live room open right now. Each browser counts once. A live-room tab left in the background for more than 2 minutes stops counting until the attendee returns to it. Banned attendees don't count. |
| (shown: …) | The count attendees currently see, when it differs from the real one. That's the case when the session simulates its online count (see Simulated online count), and it can also happen for a moment otherwise, because the attendees' count refreshes only once a minute. |
| peak | The highest real online count so far in this session, measured once a minute. |
| messages | Chat messages posted in this session, including your team's messages and the automatic chat announcements. |
Apart from (shown: …), these are real counts: the simulated count never replaces them in the control panel.
Stats tab
The Stats tab repeats the three numbers as Online Now, Peak and Messages and adds:
- Live Session: a chart of viewers minute by minute, from the start of the live part to its end (or to now while it runs). Dashed markers, named in the legend under the chart, show the Peak, when each Poll was last activated, the last time an Offer was shown and the last time Feedback was requested. Before there's any data, the chart reads "Waiting for session to start...".
- Conversion Funnels: the funnels attached to this session, with their step counts for this session. The numbers refresh every 30 seconds. When the session has several funnels, switch between them with the tabs. Add Funnel attaches another of the webinar's funnels to this session; only admins and marketers can do this. See Funnels.
- Full Timeline: click to expand an hourly chart of viewers across the whole session window, from Featured From to Featured Until, replay included.
Simulated online count
Attendees see an online count in the chat header of the live room, for example 128 online. By default it's the real number of attendees in the live room, refreshed about once a minute.
You can make it show a larger, simulated number for a session instead:
- Go to Webinars → (your webinar) → Sessions and click Edit on the session. These fields are only in this Edit Session panel, not in the session panel of the Schedule.
- Check Simulate online count.
- Fill in Base and Multiplier.
- Click Save.
| Field | What it does |
|---|---|
| Base | A whole number added to the count. 0 or more. |
| Multiplier | The number the real viewer count is multiplied by. 0 or more, decimals allowed. Defaults to 1. |
Attendees then see Base + real viewers × Multiplier. The figure is recalculated every minute with a small random variation (up to about 3% of the figure either way, or up to 2 for small figures) so it moves like real traffic. For example, with Base 100 and Multiplier 1.5, 40 real viewers show as about 160 online. After you save, attendees see the new figure within about 15 seconds.
Only admins and marketers can change these fields, because they edit the session. The control panel always shows the real count, with the simulated one next to it as (shown: …).
You're responsible for how you use this
Attendees see the simulated figure as a plain online count, with no indication that it's simulated. Your organization is responsible for using this feature in line with consumer-protection law. See Acceptable Use in the SaaS Terms of Service.