The time delay is something that comes from WebinarJam’s encoding process.
This is basically the recording and transforming of your live broadcast signal into a streaming video, which is what your webinar attendees receive. That process takes a few seconds and that’s the delay you’re referring to.
However, please note that your attendees do NOT notice the delay because for them the signal appears in real time. You just need to remember that the questions you receive in the chatbox refer to what you screened a few seconds ago.
Similarly when you push content to their page, like a call to action button, they may see it in real time, but not hear you talk about it for a few seconds. As long as you keep that in mind, it’s very easy to get used to the delay and to overcome it.
From an attendee’s perspective the delay is about what they’d experience from watching live television. You don’t notice the 8 second delay when you’re watching live TV, and you don’t notice it when you’re watching a webinar either.
Finally, there’s additional delay that comes with any online video streaming, that’s entirely related to the speed of the internet connection of the viewer. Unfortunately, there’s not much that can be done about this.
To learn how to compensate for the delay, please read “How Do I Compensate for the Delay?”
Or use this list below to skip to the exact section you need.
Are you experiencing an Excessive Delay or Buffering?
An abnormally long delay (over a minute) can be due to your LiveStreaming settings please see our article about Checking Latency for JamSession.
However excessive buffering usually results from a resources issue and will also vary based on each attendee’s internet connection, machine, and what they have running while watching.
So if your attendee is watching your webinar while someone else is watching Netflix or playing an online game may experience a large delay. While other attendees may experience a delay simply from having a few extra programs open. Others may have a super fast internet and can do all these things and not experience a delay.
But there are some things you can do to improve the experience.
- Run your webinars from a hardwired internet connection instead of WiFi, if possible.
- Close out of all apps, programs, windows, tabs, music, or anything that isn’t necessary to your webinar to free up as many of your computer’s resources as possible.
- Clear your cache/cookies, log out of all Google properties, restart your machine and run your webinar from a fresh Chrome browser.
- Avoid testing both the presenter and attendee side on the same machine. This will eat your bandwidth like crazy.
We have a checklist that you can send to your attendees so they will know before the webinar that they may want to close out of other programs. Get our Attendee List