SMF·CROWDCAST
Can a prompt replace Crowdcast?
Video meetings & webinars — live events with registration
Exhibit tracking slip
Verdict
The video is the part you cannot build. Delivering a live stream to a few hundred simultaneous viewers without stuttering means an origin, a CDN and bandwidth priced per gigabyte, and Crowdcast's attendee-based pricing exists precisely because that is its cost. What surrounds the video — a registration page, reminder emails, a replay archive — is a sitting, and it is worth having on its own because it is the half that determines whether anyone shows up.
Exhibit A — The prompt
Received on31.07.2026Build the funnel around a live event. The video is handed off to whatever streaming service you already use; this build owns everything else.
Stack: your choice, Postgres, Docker Compose, a domain, and a transactional email provider with SPF, DKIM and DMARC configured.
Event: title, description, start time with an explicit timezone, duration, an optional cap, and a stream URL you paste in later.
Registration page: name, email, and up to three custom questions you define per event. On submit, store the registration and send a confirmation containing a **personal join link** with a unique token, plus a real `.ics` attachment. Generate the `.ics` yourself and get it right — `DTSTART` in UTC with a `TZID` for display, a stable `UID`, `SEQUENCE` incremented on every change so updates replace rather than duplicate, and a `METHOD:REQUEST`. Test it in Google Calendar, Apple Calendar and Outlook; they disagree, and an invite that duplicates itself is the single most common failure here.
Reminders: a schedule per event, defaulting to 24 hours, 1 hour and 10 minutes before, each sent only to registrants who have not already joined. The scheduler must be idempotent — a restart must not resend — and must respect the registrant's timezone when it renders the time.
Join: the personal link records the join and then redirects to the stream URL. That single record is what makes the whole thing measurable — registrations, joins, and the show-up rate per event and per traffic source, using a `?source=` parameter carried from the registration link.
Replay: after the event, attach a recording URL. The same personal link then serves the replay page, so replay views are attributed to the same person. Optionally require a fresh registration for the replay, and count those separately.
One report: per event, registrations by source, show-up rate, replay views, and the drop-off between reminder sends.
Write tests for `.ics` generation across the three calendar clients' expectations, for reminder idempotency after a restart, and for join tokens being single-purpose and unguessable.
Do not stream video, do not build chat, and do not host the recording.Opening prefills the prompt — press enter to run it.
Exhibit B — What you lose
- B.1 the live video itself, and the bandwidth behind it
- B.2 live chat and Q&A synchronised with the stream
- B.3 attendance analytics tied to the video timeline
- B.4 the hosted replay with its own player and CDN
- B.5 reliability when four hundred people join at the same minute
Prior art
Exhibit C — Why people still pay: live media delivery
Because live video that stutters is worse than no event, and paying per attendee is how you buy the delivery capacity without owning it.
Questions
Why is generating a calendar invite harder than it looks?
Because the three major clients disagree about timezones, updates and cancellations. Get `UID` and `SEQUENCE` wrong and every change creates a second event on the attendee's calendar, which is worse than sending no invite at all.
What does the show-up rate actually tell me?
Which channel sends people who attend rather than people who register. Registrations flatter every source equally; show-up rate separates them, and it is invisible unless you attribute the join.
Where should the video actually go?
Anywhere that already has delivery capacity — a paid streaming host, or a self-hosted Owncast instance if your audience is small and you understand the bandwidth bill. The point of this build is that the funnel does not care which you pick.
Can I export my Crowdcast registrations?
Yes, registrant and attendance data export as CSV per event. Recordings download individually, so pull those deliberately before cancelling.
Related tools
Receipt