Getting Started with Live

Learn how to create and host your Live event in Wistia.

Caroline F avatar
Written by Caroline F
Updated this week

Ready to host your first webinar? A seasoned pro? Somewhere in the middle? Wistia’s Live functionality allows you to create a live event, host it, and share the recording. You can collect viewer and attendee information, as well as analytics from the live event. Looking to send out the recording? We collect viewer analytics for this as well!

Creating a Live Event

To create a live event in your Wistia account, navigate to your Live Events page and select "Create Event."

You can also create an event right from your Content Library. Click "New" and then select "Live Event."

Note

Account Owners and Managers have access to create live events.

Following this, you can add a title, data, time, time zone, and the approximate duration of your event. You can also choose to enable your Registration page (these details can be edited later on the “Overview” page as well!).

Create Live Event (with time zone picker)

Overview Page

Once you click “Create,” you’ll be redirected the Overview page where you can edit the high-level information for your event and add it to your calendar.

Live Event Overview Page (with time zone picker)

The Overview page includes a number of details and settings for your live event:

  • The date and time

  • Time zone

  • Approximate duration

  • Description (you can also generate a description via AI)

  • The option to enable or disable registration and select a registration form

  • A setting to allow your audience to watch your live event recording

  • The folder destination in your account for the live event recording

  • Information about when your live event's creation date, who created it, and the scheduled date and time

From the Overview page, click “Join event room” to join as the host, a panelist, or view as the audience to see a preview.

Share Your Live Stream

Click "Invite" to retrieve the panelist link as well as the audience link. You can also add tracking to your audience link to see where your traffic is coming from.

Retrieve live event invite links for panelists and audience members

Note

On the Advanced Plan, live events have a maximum of 500 attendees and a 2-hour time limit. For all plan details, take a look at our Pricing page.

Panelists

To share your events with Panelists, click "Invite” from the live event's Overview page. From here, click "Copy link" to share. You can invite dozens of Panelists to join your event as presenters.

Note

Keep in mind that a maximum of four streams (presenters + screen shares) can be brought on stage at once, so we recommend limiting your panelists to around 20.

Share the Panelist link, and before joining, any panelists will be asked to enter their display name, and check to be sure they’ve selected the correct Video, Microphone (input), and Speakers (output). They can turn off their webcam, mute themselves, and test everything out before joining. Once ready, click “Join as Panelist.”

Audience

To share your event with your audience, click "Invite” from the live event's Overview page. From here, click "Copy link" to share.

The event link will take an attendee directly to the event page, or prompt them to register first.

Tip

If you’d like to make sure your live event is GDPR compliant, enable Privacy Mode in your Account Settings.

Event Customization

Click "Customize" to customize your event branding, registration page, event room, and more. For a detailed overview of our event customization options, please refer to our Customizing a Live Event documentation.

Registration

If you’d like to keep track of who’s interested in attending your event, and ultimately see who attended it, you can have any attendees sign up for your event by enabling registration. You can activate or deactivate registration on your event's Overview page.

Click "Registrants" to see how many people registered and attended your event, restrict registration access to certain email domains, send registrant information to a connected primary integration, and export your registration data.

Once you've clicked to connect your integration (or if you already have a primary integration set up), choose a desired list to send registrants to and click "Select."

If you’d like to change lists, click “Update Connection” to select a new list.

You can also keep registration open after the event has ended, so anyone who would like to watch afterwards needs to enter their information, and you can continue collecting audience member data.

On your event’s registration page, click "Join event room" and then select "View as audience" to see a preview of the registration page. You can also access a preview from the Overview page, as well as the Customize page.

The registration page includes the name of your event, the date, and the event graphic.

By default, registrants will be asked for their first and last name, as well as email.

Wistia Live Event Registration Page Preview

You can select additional fields for the registration form, which include phone number, company name, job title, and/or country, and set up additional customizations. To do so, click "Customize" and then "Registration form."

For a full breakdown of registration page and form customizations, head to our page on Customizing a Live Event.

Note

Additional registration fields cannot be added if you have an email marketing integration connected in your account, and have this set to “Primary.”

Once registration is complete, registrants have the option to add the event to their calendar.

Embedding the Registration Form

Embed the Registration form for your Live event on your own webpage using our provided embed code.

Tip

If you’d prefer to embed the Registration form via oEmbed, you’ll want to refer to our oEmbed documentation.

The Registration form embed code can be found by navigating to a scheduled Live event, clicking into the Customize page and then selecting "Registration form."

Here, click "Embed" to copy the embed code.

The form will show registration confirmation with calendar links, join links (when the event is live), and links to the live event recording (after the event has concluded).

If you choose to no longer require registration for your event, the form embed will not show the form and will only show the calendar link, join and/or event recording link.

Registering via the embedded form functions exactly like the Wistia-hosted form. If you’ve configured an integration, it will still receive registrations. If you have confirmation emails configured, those will be sent as well.

Viewers that register through your embedded form can join events via the calendar and join links in both the confirmation emails and embedded form, and their registration will persist into Wistia’s Live application.

Confirmation and Reminder Emails

Set up automated confirmation, reminder, and follow-up emails to send to live event registrants.

On the registration page of your live event, click “Customize Emails.”

Set up live event registration emails

From here, you can see a preview of the email (for desktop and mobile), and turn confirmation, reminder, and follow-up emails on or off.

Live event email preview and customize page

You can customize the text for each email, send a test email, and preview how it will look in an email inbox. Once all set, click “Save.”

Customize live event registration email

The email body will show the thumbnail you’ve set for the event. If you haven’t set a thumbnail yet, head over to the Event Details page! It also displays your account logo. To update this, the Account Owner can head to Account > Account.

You can also add links to your social profiles and verify what you’d like the sender’s name to be. Both of these can be set up and edited by the Account Owner on the email settings page in your account (head to Account > Emails Settings).

Manage social profiles and sender's name

Be sure to save your changes and once you’re all set, click “Exit Customize.”

Note

The time zone in these emails will default to the Account Owner’s time zone, and will be listed as well.

Restrict Access

On the Registration page, click “Restrict access” to exclude specific emails from being able to register for your event.

Once entered, click the plus sign icon, or hit “Enter” on your keyboard.

Your list of restricted domains will populate in the “Restrict access” modal.

Click the “x” to remove a restricted domain.

Restrict access for registrants

Anyone with a restricted domain who tries to register for the event will populate in the registration table. These registrants will not receive any reminder emails, and when it’s time for the event, they will see a message that the event no longer exists.

Restricted domain access message

Note

Restricted access will not work if a marketing automation form is enabled.

Marketing Automation Forms

If you are connected to HubSpot, Marketo, or Pardot, you can use a different form for your registration page. After you've created your live event, you'll see a "Registration" section on the Overview page. To turn on the registration for your live event, you can either select to use a Wistia form or a form for your set primary integration (if you have one enabled).

Note

Once you select a form type, this cannot be changed. For example, if you select a Wistia form and then would like to use a HubSpot form instead, you'll need to create a new live event in order to use a HubSpot form for registration.

HubSpot

To select a HubSpot form, your account must be connected to HubSpot with it set as your primary integration.

With a HubSpot form enabled, Wistia does not store any registration data. This means that not all analytics information will be available in Wistia.

Aggregate Audience Funnel data will be available on the Event Recap page, however, we cannot send any attendance updates to HubSpot.

Wistia’s registration confirmation emails cannot be sent because the registration data is passed through directly to HubSpot.

Marketo

To select a Marketo form, you must be connected to Marketo with it set as your primary integration.

Once set, Wisia does not store any data submitted through the form, as this goes directly to Marketo. Since Wistia does not store submission data, we’re unable to send event registration reminders or know if an event attendee had previously registered for an event.

Note

Attendee interactions and engagement data for Live events are not sent to contact records in Marketo at this time.

Pardot

To select a Pardot form, you must be connected to Pardot with it set as your primary integration.

Note that Wistia’s registration confirmation emails cannot be sent because registration data is passed directly to Pardot.

With a Pardot form, Wistia is unable render form fields to fit the registration section on the page. Instead, the Pardot form is displayed on an iframe. For a customized look, style your forms in Pardot before using them in Wistia.

By default, Wistia is unable to detect when a Pardot form has been submitted. However, by adding a couple small JavaScript code snippets, we are able to detect form submission.

The first snippet will need to go in your form’s layout in Pardot.

<script src="https://fast.wistia.com/assets/external/pardot-form-api.js"></script>

To add the snippet, you’ll need to:

  1. Find the Layout Template in Pardot that you want to use on your form.

  2. Click “Edit Layout Template.”

  3. Paste the snippet inside the tag of the layout.

  4. Head into a form’s details in Pardot.

  5. Click “Save.”

  6. Find the form you want to use.

  7. Click “Edit form.”

  8. Choose “Look and Feel.”

  9. Choose the Layout Template with the code added.

  10. Click “Confirm & Save.”

The second snippet will need to go into your form’s Thank You Code in Pardot.

<script type="text/javascript">//<![CDATA[ window.parent.postMessage("continuePlay","*"); // ]]></script>

To add the snippet, you’ll need to:

  1. Head into a form’s details in Pardot.

  2. Click “Edit form.”

  3. Choose “Completion Actions.”

  4. Open the “Thank You Code” tab and add the code snippet

  5. Click “Confirm & Save.”

Note

Without the code snippet, the registrant will not be tracked when the form is submitted.

Note

Pardot form tracker domains must be https enabled to be used for Live registration. This can be enabled in your Pardot account.

Attendance Data

You can see who exactly attended your live event in your connected primary integration. Head on over to our Live Event Attendance Data page for more information.

Simulcasting

You can stream your live event to up to 5 additional locations, such as Facebook and LinkedIn. If you have an RTMP URL and Stream Key for the platforms you’d like to stream to, you can connect them via the Simulcast tab.

Once connected, your event will display on the connected platforms when it goes live.

Note

Your device's internet bandwidth will not be affected by simulcasting. The streaming to the other platforms occurs between our servers and theirs.

Presenting Media During an Event

Play videos from your Wistia account directly in a Live event! With this feature, you can create a playlist of your Wistia videos for each Live event, and play those videos natively during a webinar.

Note

Only Hosts can add and/or interact with media during a Live Event.

To get started, navigate to the Event room and click the “Media” tab under the chat panel.

From here, you’ll be able to select videos from your Wistia account to add to a playlist. This playlist can be used at any point during your Live event.

Tip

Hosts can join the Event room at any time before the event to pre-populate this playlist with media.

Clicking “Play on stage” will bring the video on stage and begin automatically playing it.

When a video is playing, Hosts cannot bring Panelists onto the stage. The video can be removed at any time to bring Panelists back on stage.

Once the video is over, the Host can either choose another video to play on stage in its place, or remove the existing video from the stage.

  • Playing another video on stage will switch out the two videos, and begin playing the new video.

  • Removing the existing video from the stage will automatically revert the stage layout to its previous state.

Copy Event

If you’ll be hosting a similar event in the future, in your Live Events folder, you can click “Copy” to create a brand new event with the same title, description, and branding. We’ll save a copy in the same folder with fresh registrant data and analytics.

Delete Event

If you’d like to delete your event, click “Delete Event” and confirm your decision.

Delete Your Wistia Live Event

Note

This cannot be undone.

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