Room timeline

The room timeline decides what happens in the room while your video plays: when the offer appears, when a poll opens, when a handout unlocks, and what the chat says. Open it under Webinars → your webinar → Set up → Room timeline.

Everything is placed against the video’s clock, not the time of day. An offer at 45:00 appears 45 minutes into every session and every replay. Add your video first, so the timeline knows how long it is and the preview has something to play.

The step has three parts: a live preview of the room, an inspector for the selected item, and the tracks underneath. With nothing selected, the inspector shows a short Working the timeline guide and how many offers, polls, handouts and chat messages you’ve placed.

The four item types

Only one offer and one poll show at a time. If two overlap, attendees see the one that starts first until it ends, so an offer set to run to the end hides any later offer. Give the earlier one a Disappears time.

Add an item

Move items and change their length

Dragging saves on its own when you let go. A dark label shows the new time while you drag.

An offer or poll must show for at least 5 seconds when you resize it on the track or type a time in the inspector.

Each track row is labelled with its type and a count. Chat messages appear as small ticks, darker for hosts. Items with Show in the room off look hatched, and their label starts with “Hidden”.

Edit an item in the inspector

Click an item to select it. The playhead jumps to the item’s start and the inspector shows its fields.

All types share these timing fields:

The footer tells you where you stand:

If you drag an item with unsaved field edits, the new time saves but your field edits stay unsaved.

To close the inspector, use the X. Closing it or selecting another item drops unsaved field edits with no warning, so save first.

Duplicate or delete

The More actions menu (three dots) has two commands:

• Duplicate at playhead copies the item into a new draft at the playhead. Choose Add to save it. A copy keeps the original’s length. If it would run past the end of the video, it moves back so it still fits.
• Delete removes it straight away.

The Delete button in the footer asks first: it changes to Confirm delete for 3 seconds. There’s no undo. Deleting a poll also deletes its answers and removes it from your reports.

See how an item performed

Once people have seen an item, the inspector shows a Last 30 days line, such as “1,240 people saw it and 86 clicked (6.9%).” Polls show how many people answered, and handouts how many opened them. Scheduled chat messages have no stats.

Add a handout

Handouts are links to something attendees can take away, such as a workbook or a script. They show in a Resources tab that appears when the first handout unlocks, with a dot to mark anything new.

Choose Choose a file from Media to use a file from your media library, or upload a new one from that window: PDF, ZIP, DOCX, XLSX, PPTX, EPUB, CSV, TXT, MP3 or M4A, up to 1 GB.

Once unlocked, a handout stays for the rest of the session. All your handouts also appear under From the session on the page people see when it ends.

Use the preview

The preview is the real room frame, drawn at the playhead’s position, using your actual video. Nothing you do in it is tracked or sent anywhere. The item you’ve selected gets a colored ring.

If the video can’t load, the line beside the controls says “The video could not load here, so the playhead runs on a clock.” You can still check your timing. With no video, the preview says “Add a video to see it here”.

The attendee counter in the preview uses the same formula as the real room, including the “here now” line in shared chat. See Chat & questions.

Controls and keyboard shortcuts

Work with scheduled chat

Above the tracks, Import chat adds messages from a CSV or text file. The More chat actions menu has Export chat as CSV and Clear all chat, which asks you to confirm and can’t be undone.

For the file format, see CSV formats. For writing and managing messages, see Scheduled chat.

See where people drop off

After real people have watched, a Show who’s still watching switch appears above the tracks. It draws a dashed line over them showing how many viewers were present at each minute of the video, counted across all your sessions.

Use it to place your offer before the drop, or to add a poll where attention fades. It counts live viewers only, not replays.

When changes reach attendees

Saved changes apply to every session, including sessions that have already been scheduled, with no republishing.

• Offers, polls and handouts load when an attendee opens the room. Someone already watching won’t see your change until they reload.
• Scheduled chat loads in chunks as the session goes on, so a change can reach people in the room later in the session.

Avoid editing the timeline during a session you care about, and test changes with your own registration. See Go live.

Common problems

Limits

Next, write your offers and polls.