Why is my automated webinar video starting from the very beginning when I refresh the watch room page?

A lot of the time, if you're running an automated webinar, you want to make it feel like a "live" webinar in order to maximize attendee engagement.

That means if a webinar attendee refreshes the page in the middle of a webinar, or joins the webinar late, the video should start playing at the "correct" time, as if the attendee were watching a live event, rather than the video starting from the very beginning.

So you might wonder while testing out your webinar funnel, "why is my automated webinar video starting from the very beginning when I refresh the watch room page?"

The most likely reason you are experiencing this is that you are using the "non-unique" watch room link from the "Get links" pop-up (shown in the screenshot below).

We give you this link so that you can access the watch room in order to test your webinar funnel out. We do not recommend giving/sending this link directly to attendees (unless you turn on webinar sign-in for your webinar).

We highly, highly recommend sending your traffic/leads to your registration page first. That way, when they sign up for the webinar, they'll be shown their unique webinar link and they'll also be sent their unique session link via email/text messages. Our webinar software can also send the registrant's unique event link and event date/time to ALL of our 3rd party integrations. See the screenshots below to see examples of the unique session links registrants will see in their email and on the thank you pages.

If you really want, you can send your attendees the non-unique link, however again, we do not recommend it unless you have the webinar sign-in feature turned on for your webinar.

If you or your attendees join the webinar watch room via the non-unique link, certain aspects of the automated webinar will not work like you (most likely) want. For example, refreshing the page will cause the video to start from the very beginning. Also, things like attendee analytics will not track properly.

Obviously, this can hurt the feel of your automated webinar feeling more like a "live" event. So that's why we highly recommend not giving your attendees the non-unique watch room link.