Announcing Hopin’s latest product, Session, and the future of interactive webinars and meetings

Today, I’m thrilled to announce the initial public rollout of Hopin Session, a lightweight, fun, and super interactive webinar and meetings product, built for everything from everyday meetings, to weekly all hands and training workshops, to monthly webinars, quarterly summits, and more.

Hopin Session, or just Session for short, is our latest product announcement as a part of Hopin’s evolution into a multiproduct suite that better serves our customers and is now available with free and paid plans at session.com.

Why Session, why now? - The unbundling of experiences

At Hopin, we have always believed in our mission of bringing people closer together by creating the best possible online experiences. That means listening to our customers and trying to enable them to engage with their customers, stakeholders and community in powerful ways.

With more efficient marketing, a noisy market and consumer expectations radically changing - we see the world shifting to simpler, more lightweight yet extremely engaging experiences. It is our belief that bringing the powerful, engaging and the produced experience usually reserved for much larger events and conferences to more lightweight and smaller experiences like webinars, meetings, all hands and workshops will lead to significantly better customer experiences and help creators, influencers and businesses elevate how they engage with their own community.

Starting with the Jamm and Streamable acquisition, we set out to further explore what this unbundling of online digital experiences entailed. While the Hopin Events platform was running at full velocity, servicing larger events, conferences, and tradeshows - we saw an even bigger opportunity.

Today, we’re excited to pull back the curtain on what we’ve been building and the problems we’ve been solving for, with Session.

What does Session aim to solve?

We learned from millions of users, our market research, and constantly testing and iterating on products that we needed to solve five major problems in the video conferencing and webinar industry. These are detailed below, but at a high level, we believe there is a large gap and a clear opportunity to bring the engagement of Hopin Events to much more lightweight, simpler yet more engaging experiences with Session. Our goal is to serve those high-frequency and low complexity online gatherings that are just as critical as big tentpole events.

  1. Low engagement rates 👉high engagement rates (with data to prove it). The average turnout rate in the webinar industry is 30-45%. Because why would anyone show up to a webinar that they can simply watch the recording of on their own time? Today’s common video solutions for webinars, all hands, team trainings, and community events are sufficient to deliver content but they fall short in delivering high attendee engagement and interaction. Session introduces a banquet of new engagement tools for participants and speakers to interact and enjoy the experience.
  • Session features included: Confetti cursor, attendee chat highlights, animated emoji reactions and audience bursts, Q&A, breakouts, and a modern chat experience with ample interactivity.
  1. Complex software and clunky UX 👉lightweight, simple and easy-to-use UX for all. Outdated, time-consuming technology with lots of levers that sometimes require a third-party partner to produce an only average attendee experience is a way of the past. With Session, the future is lightweight, simple, and easy-to-use but without compromising on professional production and quality of experience.
  • Session features included: one-click joining, easy speaker management, instant co hosting, automated recordings, customizable registration microsite, stage access controls, and three customizable room themes (Meetup, Workshop, and Interactive Webinar).
  1. Lack of branding and customizing 👉fully-branded and customized experiences. Video solutions that are one-size-fits-all make everything look and feel the same. It’s fatiguing but it doesn’t have to be. With Session, every one of your webinars, events, and meetings can be tailored to your unique goals of the experience and feel like an extension of your own brand — fully you, down to the button color.
  • Session features included: Custom name labels, custom backgrounds, custom logos, custom UI colors, custom registration pages, and custom music.
  1. Expensive pricing plans 👉new affordable pricing model. Video platforms are all but commoditized today. It’s too easy to settle for free software that is functional, but delivers an unremarkable experience. With Session, you don’t have to settle.
  • Session is priced for the future. You get unlimited registrations, unlimited events, and a low monthly price with double the value of any competing platform. And of course, an always-generous Free plan.
  1. Shallow analytics and ROI data 👉 detailed attendee engagement reports. Live video technology has the potential to deliver some of the richest engagement data on the web, but today’s platforms barely scratch the surface in terms of being able to capture and surface actionable insights and attendee data.
  • Session features included: Post-event branded microsite, charts of attendee engagement, individual analytics, chat transcripts and resources, video recordings, and ability to export all your data.

How is Session different from the rest of our suite?

All of the Hopin products connect people, build community, and power business, but there are nuances within the unique experiences and engagement they each provide. I encourage you to try each of the platforms yourself, but for now, here’s a high level description of how each of the Hopin products work together as an ecosystem:

  • Hopin Events - great for your larger multi-track events, conferences, trade shows, networking, sponsor booths, and robust registration capabilities.
  • Session - great for your interactive large and small webinars, team all hands, meetings, AMAs, and workshops.
  • StreamYard - great for creating professional live streams, multistreaming, recording video content, podcasts, and streaming webinars..
  • Streamable - great for uploading, editing, and sharing your videos easily online.

Session is just starting to roll out, but we’ve already had hundreds of early access customers creating community and team events with Session, including AWS, Belong Home, BVNK, LaunchNotes, Sentisum and more. A huge thank you to the beta users and early access community who helped us build Session into what it is today.  

As of today, we’re removing the waitlist at session.com and letting in the thousands who requested access to Session. Join us for a town hall event on Wednesday, December 7th at 9am PT / 12pm ET to learn more about Session, meet the team, and ask any questions.

I look forward to your feedback as we continue to build Session to be the best place for live community events, webinars and audience engagement.

Sign up today for free at session.com.