Webinare (automated webinars)

Marketing → Webinare turns a video into a webinar that plays at an appointment – for everybody who registered, at the same time. It has a registration page, a confirmation with a calendar file, reminders by e-mail and SMS, a room with a countdown, questions, polls and an offer button, a recording, and numbers for every session. Webinars are automated and say so: the room is labelled Automatisiertes Webinar (and Aufzeichnung for the recording), never “live” – see Honest by design.

Everything is per sub-account. The menu entry and the API use the area Funnels & Websites (member logins need it; the SaaS plan decides whether a sub-account has it).

• How it works
• Set up (self-hosters)
• The editor
• Honest by design and German law (UWG)
• Tracking and automations
• Numbers
• API, MCP tools and the app
• Data protection
• For developers

How it works

1. Create a webinar (Marketing → Webinare → Neues Webinar): title, description, presenter, a video and its length. It starts as a draft nobody can see.
2. Choose appointments (tab Termine): fixed weekdays and times, single dates, just in time, start right away, blackout days, seats per session. Sessions are never stored in advance – a session is just its start time, calculated from these rules; it exists once somebody registers.
3. Publish. The registration page is https://<your-domain>/w/<slug>; it also works as an embed (?embed=1) inside a funnel page (block HTML) and as a target for forms.
4. Somebody registers: a contact is created or updated (tags, source Webinar: …), a registration is stored, the confirmation goes out with the personal room link and a .ics file, webinar.registered runs.
5. Reminders go out (default: 24 h and 1 h before, 15 min before, at the start; e-mail, optional SMS).
6. At the appointment the person opens the room from the link: a waiting room with a countdown, then the video from the second the schedule is at (late joiners start in the middle, nobody can skip ahead), then the end with a link to the recording (open for 48 h by default).
7. During the session: questions land in Konversationen, polls and the offer appear at their second, everything is counted per person.
8. Shortly after the end each registration is booked: watched share and left at for those who were there, missed for those who were not – both start workflows.

Appointments

Mode	What it does
Fixed times	Chosen weekdays at one or more times, in the zone of the webinar (daylight saving safe – 19:00 stays 19:00). Offered up to Wie weit im Voraus days ahead.
Single dates	Any date and time, in addition to or instead of fixed times.
Just in time	The next start is always minutes away: every 5–720 minutes on the clock face, inside a daily window and on chosen weekdays (e.g. every 15 minutes from 9 to 21 o’clock). The next three starts are offered.
Start right away	“Jetzt starten”: the session begins for this person when they register, and they land in the room immediately. Registering twice while it runs returns the same session.
Blackout days	Days (or ranges) without sessions; they also remove single dates.
Seats	Plätze pro Termin (0 = unlimited). A full session shows ausgebucht; cancelled registrations give their seat back.
Entry after the start	nur pünktlich, up to 5 / 15 / 30 / 60 minutes after the start, or until the end. Somebody who is already in stays in. Later arrivals see Der Einlass ist geschlossen and the recording after the end.

Times are shown in the viewer’s time zone (the browser’s); e-mails use the zone the person registered in; the editor shows a preview of the next sessions.

Video sources

Source	Notes
Upload	Chunked (8 MB parts) so it works behind proxies; MP4, MOV, WebM, MKV, Ogg; the first bytes are checked. Stored in data/webinars/; streamed with byte ranges to people whose session is running (or whose recording is open) – never to the waiting room. The editor reads the length from the file. Limit 4 GB (PGHL_WEBINAR_MAX_MB).
Link	An https:// link to an MP4/WebM file or an HLS playlist (.m3u8).
YouTube / Vimeo	Any link form or the id. Starts at the right second with controls hidden and a layer that blocks clicks; no drift correction (the players are not ours) – use a file when exact timing matters.
Video-Studio	A finished clip or an upload of the Video-Studio of the same sub-account.

For a file the room is the clock: the video is set to the schedule’s second at the start and every 2 seconds if it drifts more than 2.5 s; seeking is undone, there is no scrubber while the session runs. The recording is free playback with a scrubber and resumes where the viewer stopped.

Self-hosting

Nothing to install. What matters:

• PGHL_BASE_URL must be the public https:// address – it is in every link of the confirmation and reminders, and browsers only autoplay and sync reliably over HTTPS.
• A sender. Mail and SMS go through the sub-account’s senders (Einstellungen → Kanäle). With the provider log nothing is sent (messages are only recorded) – fine for trying it out.
• The background tick (PGHL_TICK_MS, default 15 s) sends reminders and books finished sessions; keep the server running.
• Uploads: data/webinars/ needs space for your videos (the editor refuses an upload when the disk would run below ~256 MB free). Back it up like the rest of data/. A reverse proxy must pass PUT bodies of 8 MB and Range requests (Caddy and Traefik do by default; nginx: client_max_body_size 16m;, and do not buffer the stream: proxy_buffering off; for /w/).
• HLS in Chrome and Firefox needs the small player library hls.js, which HyperLevel does not ship (no new dependencies). Safari, iOS and recent Android browsers play HLS natively. To support the others, download hls.min.js from the hls.js release page and save it as data/webinar-assets/hls.min.js; it is then served from your own domain at /w/_hls.js (no third-party request). Without it the room says that the browser cannot play HLS.
• Content-Security-Policy: the room loads video only from your server (and from the linked file’s https host, and YouTube/Vimeo for embeds). Embeds in other sites are allowed for the registration page only.
• Custom funnel domains also serve /w/… (everything else on such a domain belongs to the funnel). Links in e-mails always use PGHL_BASE_URL.

Not needed: no Zoom, no streaming server, no WebSockets.

The editor

In Einfach-Modus (theming) Grunddaten folds photo and address, Termine keeps fixed times, single dates and the preview in view (time zone, just in time, start right away, blackout days and seats behind one toggle), Anmeldung folds headline, button text, redirect and the behaviour tags. A folded part opens by itself when it differs from a new webinar.

Six tabs; Speichern saves the whole form, Veröffentlichen saves and publishes (it tells you what is missing: video, length, at least one appointment). Zurück zum Entwurf takes the page offline (registrations stay).

Tab	What you set
Grunddaten	Title, description, presenter and photo, address (slug), the video source, the length.
Termine	Time zone, fixed times, single dates, just in time, start right away, blackout days, seats, entry after the start, and a live preview of the next sessions.
Anmeldung	Headline, button text, the consent text (required), phone (optional/required) and SMS consent, thank-you text or a redirect, tags (on registration and by behaviour: attended, missed, clicked the offer, bought, watched the recording), team notification, forms that register their senders for the next free session, link and embed code.
Raum & Angebot	The labels (see below), waiting and end texts, questions on/off, attendee counter, automatic chat messages, polls, the offer (a product, a form or a link; a moment in the video; an optional real deadline), the recording (on/off, how many hours), and Raum testen (a preview from any minute that counts nothing and also works for drafts).
Erinnerungen	Confirmation subject/text and the reminder list: each with minutes/hours/days before the start, e-mail and/or SMS, and its own texts. Merge fields: `{{contact.first_name
Auswertung	Numbers, drop-off curve, polls, the registrations (filter by session / present / absent) and the questions with a link into the inbox.

Reminders are sent once per registration and channel, never for a moment that was before the person registered (“24 hours before” a minute after signing up), and not when the moment is more than 20 minutes past (a server that was off). SMS needs the person’s consent (checkbox on the page, shown when they enter a number) and a phone number; Nicht stören is respected for reminders (the confirmation is transactional and always goes out).

The confirmation carries the .ics as an attachment with the SMTP sender and as a link (/w/<slug>/ics?t=…) with every sender. Calendar entries have a 15-minute alert and the personal link.

Honest by design and German law (UWG)

An automated webinar that pretends to be live misleads the audience (irreführende geschäftliche Handlung, § 5 UWG; the same applies in other EU countries). HyperLevel builds the honesty in:

• The registration page, the room and the recording always show a label: Automatisiertes Webinar by default, Aufzeichnung for the recording. You can change the wording (Webinar-Training, Training zum Abruf …), but the settings refuse anything that claims it is live – “live”, “Live-Webinar”, “Livestream”, “in Echtzeit”, “Direktübertragung” in any spelling – in the labels, the waiting and end texts and the registration headline. Empty falls back to the default. The label also sits as a badge on the video itself.
• Automatic chat messages are off by default. When you switch them on, every one carries the fixed note “Automatische Nachricht” that cannot be turned off – they never look like contributions of real viewers. Real attendees’ questions are never shown to other attendees.
• The attendee counter is off by default. When on, it shows the real number of people in the room (heartbeat in the last 45 seconds). There is no setting to boost or invent a number.
• A countdown on the offer is real. After the deadline the button stops working for everybody, also in the recording. There is no per-visitor timer that restarts, because “only 10 minutes left” for an offer that never ends is the classic case of misleading scarcity.
• The default texts say what happens: the video is played at the appointment, questions are answered by the team afterwards.
• Registration needs an explicit consent checkbox; the text is yours to word (purpose: the registration, reminders by e-mail; SMS has its own checkbox). Cancelling a seat is one click on a confirmation page ({{cancel_url}}).

The text of the title and description is yours – HyperLevel does not police editorial copy. This page is not legal advice.

Tracking and automations

Per registration HyperLevel records: registered, attended (the first heartbeat while the video runs), watch share and watch seconds, left at, clicked the offer, bought (a purchase of the offer’s product within 14 days of a click is booked to the webinar), watched the recording. The timeline of the contact shows each step (Für Webinar angemeldet, Im Webinar, Webinar … 72 % gesehen, Angebot angeklickt, Nach dem Webinar gekauft, Aufzeichnung angesehen, verpasst, Frage, Umfrage), and the tags of the Anmeldung tab are set.

Live watch time is measured by the server’s clock from the heartbeats (every 20 seconds); what the browser reports cannot lengthen or shorten it. Only the recording trusts the reported position.

Workflow triggers

All six also take the filter Webinar (empty = any webinar) and the generic filters of every trigger.

Trigger	When	Extra data
webinar.registered	A new registration (page, form, workflow, team, MCP)
webinar.attended	First heartbeat while the video runs	offset_s – where in the video the person came in
webinar.missed	~5 minutes after the session, for those who were never in the room
webinar.watched_percent	~5 minutes after the session, for those who were there – filter Mindestens … %	percent, watched_s, left_at
webinar.cta_clicked	First click on the offer button	offer {title, url}
webinar.replay_watched	The recording starts playing	percent

Event data of all of them: webinarId, webinar {id, title, slug}, registrationId, session {start, end, kind} (kind: fixed, date, jit, ondemand), join_url, replay_url, plus the contact. Use {{event.replay_url}} in a “you missed it” mail.

Workflow action

Kontakt für Webinar anmelden (webinar_register, category Inhalte, Kurse & Community): picks a webinar, registers the contact of the run for the next free session (or Sofort starten), sends the confirmation unless keine Bestätigungs-E-Mail is ticked, and sets {{var.webinar_join_url}} and {{var.webinar_session}}. Same contact, same session: nothing happens twice. The registration is written to the audit log (actor Workflow).

Forms

Anmeldung → Formulare, die anmelden: whoever submits one of the ticked forms is registered for the next free session. The form needs an e-mail field.

Numbers

Tab Auswertung, API GET /api/webinars/:id/stats, MCP ghl_webinar_stats:

• Registrations – seats that were not cancelled. Attended – were in the room while the video ran.
• Show-up rate – attended ÷ registrations of sessions that have started (open sessions do not drag it down).
• Average watch time – seconds per attendee, and as a share of the video.
• Drop-off curve – 21 points from start to end: the share of attendees who were in the room at that second (late joiners count from their entry).
• Offer – clicks (all) and people (first clicks), sales and revenue (only when the offer’s target is a product and the buyer clicked first; revenue in cents).
• Recording views, questions, poll results (real counts).

Each session is a row (all “start right away” registrations form one row).

API, MCP tools and the app

Team routes (login with x-location-id, sub-account API key or agency key; area Funnels & Websites; every write is in the audit log): the full list is under Webinare in docs/api.md.

MCP tools (read tools are read-only; registering sends a confirmation mail, so agents ask first): ghl_webinar_list, ghl_webinar_get, ghl_webinar_register, ghl_webinar_stats.

App: GET /api/mobile/webinars, /api/mobile/webinars/:id, /api/mobile/webinars/:id/stats (read-only, same areas and sub-accounts as the web).

Data protection

• A registration stores name, e-mail (and optionally phone) as a contact, the consent time and the viewer’s time zone, and the viewing data above. It is part of the contact’s export and erasure (DSGVO): erasing a contact deletes its registrations, questions and votes.
• Double opt-in is optional. Anybody can type an address into a registration page; the person then gets the confirmation with the personal link, and the link goes only by e-mail (for a session in the future the page itself never shows it), so a stranger cannot watch “as” somebody else. Pages limit registrations per address (20 a minute) and a hidden field catches simple bots. The registration itself is not held back, but consent to webinar mail and SMS reminders is recorded in the consent ledger (box text and version, time, IP network) and, if you switch on Einstellungen → Einwilligung & Recht → Double-Opt-in → Webinar-Anmeldung, only counts after the person clicked a confirmation link (one extra mail; trigger consent.confirmed). Details: docs/consent.md.
• Pages are noindex, no-store, send no referrer, and load nothing from third parties – except YouTube (privacy-enhanced domain) or Vimeo (do-not-track) when you chose those as video source.
• The viewer link contains a signature (HMAC with the server secret); cancelling the registration revokes it.

For developers

Modules (all registered near the end of server/modules/index.ts, no shared file holds webinar code):

File	Purpose
modules/webinars.ts	Tables, team routes (/api/webinars*), the chunked upload, app.services.webinars (get, tick, sweep)
modules/webinar-public.ts	/w/<slug>, /watch, /replay, /ics, /media, /go, /cancel, /w/_hls.js, /api/public/webinars/<slug>/*
modules/webinar-automation.ts	Triggers + filters, the action, the form bridge, purchase attribution, the tick
modules/webinar-tools.ts	MCP tools, /api/mobile/webinars*
services/webinar-schedule.ts	Pure: sessions, blackout, just in time, the room clock
services/webinar-model.ts	Defaults, validation, honest-wording rules, signed tokens
services/webinar-video.ts	Pure: video sources, embeds, byte ranges
services/webinar-register.ts	Registration, confirmation, .ics, reminders
services/webinar-track.ts	Heartbeat, offer, questions, votes, end-of-session bookkeeping
services/webinar-stats.ts, webinar-pages.ts, webinar-room-client.ts	Numbers; the public HTML; the room’s script and styles
web/src/pages/Webinars.tsx, WebinarEditor.tsx, WebinarTabs.tsx, WebinarRoomTab.tsx, WebinarStats.tsx, WebinarKit.tsx	The UI (lazy chunk)

Test hooks: app.services.webinarNow = () => ms moves the module’s clock (schedules, heartbeats, reminders, end-of-session); tests live in tests/webinar-*.test.ts. Mail and SMS are the sub-account’s log provider in tests; nothing calls the network.