Webinar

What this is about

A webinar is a scheduled live session built around slides, a demo and an audience that can type back. Companies run it to qualify leads or teach a paying group, which is why it gets measured in registrations and watch-through rather than views. That distinguishes it from the expert talk, which is edited once and stays evergreen, and from the interview series, which is recorded in batches and released on a rhythm. The production is small: one or two presenters, a controlled room, a wired uplink, a moderator on chat. The replay is a second product — and it only exists if somebody planned it before the session started.

The format determines scope, crew and timeline — before the first location has been scouted.

What runs differently here

In planning terms, that means:

• Everything gets rehearsed against the clock: a dry run on the real platform with the real slides and the real uplink, never a shortened version
• Chat moderation is a production role, not a courtesy — one person handles questions while the presenter talks, or the Q&A collapses
• Audio outranks picture here: viewers forgive a plain frame but leave within seconds of room echo or a clipping microphone
• The replay needs its own plan — clean opening, no references to the live date, and a defined cut point before the internal wrap-up

What the plan has to deliver

A production plan is useful to this role when it provides the following:

• A tech rehearsal on the actual platform with the people who will actually speak, including screen share and slide handover
• A run-down with minute markers for intro, content blocks, demo and Q&A, plus a named chat moderator
• A wired connection, a fallback uplink and a recording that runs locally as well as in the cloud

Common pitfalls

What most often goes wrong in practice:

• Treating the slide deck as the plan — the timed run-down is what keeps the session from overrunning
• Skipping the dry run with an external speaker, so the first screen-share failure happens in front of the audience
• Publishing the raw recording with the live small talk and the empty first three minutes still attached

With TillyGen

TillyGen turns a webinar briefing into a minute-by-minute run-down, a tech-rehearsal checklist and a recording plan — so the live session and its replay are both planned before anyone joins.

Change one constraint and the consequences travel through the whole plan: affected shots are flagged, the call sheet is regenerated, and nobody keeps working from yesterday's version.