Introducing pretix Webinar and Digital Content

In our last blog posts, we talked a lot about the first part of our COVID-19 tips – how to cancel your event and limit the damage. Now, we're happy to turn onto a more positive note and announce two new features that help you with the second part: Transforming your event from an in-person format to a digital one.

pretix Webinar

Many workshop- or coaching-style events that used to be in-person meetings are now being taken online in the form of a "webinar" – a video-based session enabling participants to not only see a live presentation, but start a real-time discussion within a group. There are lots of amazing tools around for webinars with very different strengths and feature sets, and some of them have been around for a long time.

However, in this unique situation, many of you are looking for a new webinar solution under great time pressure and we want to help you by making it as easy as possible – and what could be easier than a webinar system directly integrated into pretix?

Of course, we did not build this solution from scratch but built upon the great open source tool BigBlueButton which is popular among educational institutions due to it's wide featureset tailor-made for learning environments:

• Fully browser-based, your attendees don't need to install anything. Works great with Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and Safari, both on computers as well as on Android and iOS phones and tablets.

• Webcam support and live screen sharing of multiple participants.

• A live whiteboard that you can use to show a presentation, highlight, draw, and write. Your attendees see your changes in real time and if you want, you can even allow them to use the whiteboard as well.

• Chat, real-time polls, breakout rooms for group discussions, collaborative notes.

Additionally, due to the fact that it's integrated and hosted by us, there are some additional advantages over other webinar tools: There's no additional cost if you use it for a paid webinar with ticket sales managed with pretix and we can give you our usual strong privacy guarantee. There are no additional data processors.

For now, pretix Webinar considered a "beta" feature as we are learning how it works best. In our tests, it works perfectly fine with around 20 people sharing their camera and microphone, or only a handful of people sharing their camera and microphone and a larger number of people listening. As we want to make sure there's enough server capacity at the time of your webinar to avoid any surprises, please just send us a short email to sales@pretix.eu to get it the feature activated for your event.

pretix Digital Content

Even if pretix Webinar isn't the perfect fit for you, since you're planning a live stream for a large audience – or just want to sell an e-book – we've added everything you need. With our new Digital Content plugin, you can use pretix as a paywall for your digital content of any kind. Live stream, video, link, download file, webinar with a different tool – you name it.

Here's an example of a pretix shop that sells access to a video from our new YouTube channel, but you can also embed live streams or videos from Vimeo or just link anywhere on the web. Looking for some specific integration? Just let us know!