Scheduling & Availability in eWebinar

Scheduling controls when and how people can access your eWebinar. It is one of the most consequential configuration decisions you'll make, because availability drives results.

The core principle

When someone discovers your eWebinar, they're interested right now. That interest fades.

With a live session, the scheduled time is the event. Miss it, and you miss the event. With eWebinar, you can make it possible for someone to watch immediately, while their motivation is still high. That's what the options on the Schedule tab are designed to unlock.

Customers who embrace this level of availability consistently see higher attendance, stronger engagement, and longer watch times.

The four session types

The Schedule tab gives you three ways for people to access your eWebinar, and registrants can watch a replay after their session. The three serve different intents and can be combined.

On-demand: For immediate access. Someone lands on your registration page and can start watching right away. By default the experience runs in real time — attendees can't skip ahead — but you can let them control the video (see below). If they leave and come back, they pick up where they left off.

Just-in-time: For near-immediate access. There's always a session starting within the next few minutes (which creates urgency), so attendees never wait long. It runs in real time, like a scheduled session.

Scheduled sessions: For people who can't watch right then and need or want to come back later. They choose a time, it goes on their calendar, and they show up when they're ready.

Replays: For flexible, self-directed access after a session. In eWebinar, every session is technically a recording, but replays are a distinct session type because of how they behave. Unlike the other session types, which play through once, a replay works like a video player: after their session, registrants get a personal link they can use at any time (until it expires, if you turn on Set replays to expire under Settings › Replays), watch repeatedly, and control fully: pausing, skipping, rewinding, or restarting at will.

Replays come up in two places:

In your schedule. Nobody registers for a replay, but you can give people who watch on-demand the same full control of the video by turning on Attendees watching on-demand may fully control the video playback under Schedule › On-demand sessions. An eWebinar whose registration form offered a replay now offers on-demand sessions with this turned on. This is the decision that requires more thought. The tradeoff: someone encountering your content for the first time can skip around freely, which means they may miss key moments or bypass the experience you designed. For some use cases that's fine; for others it isn't. See our playbook on the topic to decide whether to turn it on: How to Use Replays in eWebinar →

In follow-up emails. Sending a replay link to registrants who didn't attend — or who want to revisit the content — is standard practice and almost universally recommended.

The recommended default for the other three session types is to offer all of them together. On-demand and just-in-time capture people while interest is highest. Scheduled sessions serve as a fallback, important because without them, people who can't watch right now may leave and not return.

On-demand vs. replays: an important distinction

These two session types are easy to confuse because both let people watch on their own schedule. The difference is how the experience works.

By default, on-demand sessions run in real time, like a scheduled session. The video progresses on its own and attendees can't skip around. Replays, on the other hand, give viewers full control of the video player, like watching a recording. You can give on-demand viewers that same control with the setting described above.

The choice matters depending on your goal. Real-time on-demand preserves the experience of a live event. Full control, as in a replay, offers full flexibility for the attendee to watch when, how, and only what they want.

The tradeoff: availability vs. chat coverage

The most common reason teams limit availability in their schedules is chat. If your team can't respond to messages 24/7, offering round-the-clock sessions can feel like a problem.

It isn't, and here's why:

eWebinar's chat is asynchronous by design. When an attendee sends a message and no one is available, an auto-response sets expectations. When someone on your team responds later, the reply goes to the attendee by email. Every question gets answered. The experience still works.

This means you can offer broad availability without requiring your team to be on call.

That said, some teams have strict response-time requirements, such as SLAs, internal policies, or high-accountability support contexts where delayed responses are genuinely unacceptable. For those cases, the right answer is to limit availability to your staffed hours, not to abandon availability as a principle.

The principle in practice

There is no single correct schedule configuration. The right setup depends on your goals, your audience, and your team's capacity.

What is consistent: the more available your eWebinar is, the better your results are likely to be. Every scheduling decision should be made with that in mind.

Where to go next