Riverside Webinars and Live Streaming: Plans, Setup and Limits

Riverside splits live audiences across two plans, priced per account. Live streaming starts on Grow, at $45 a month billed monthly or $34 a month billed annually ($408 a year), and pushes one studio feed to YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, X, Twitch, TikTok, Instagram and any custom RTMP site at once. Webinars start on the Webinar plan, at $99 a month billed monthly or $79 a month billed annually ($948 a year), with registration, Q&A, polls and surveys for up to 100 registrants per live session.^[1] Only Business, sold by custom quote, goes higher, up to 10,000 registrants depending on the plan. Pro has no live streaming. Every plan, Free included, can still let up to 100 viewers watch inside Riverside through an audience link.

Pick the right way to put people in the room

Riverside gives you three audience modes, and they are not interchangeable. The audience link is the free one: viewers open a public link, watch inside Riverside, chat, and can ask to call in from Chrome or Edge on a computer, and accepted callers get their own high-quality track. No registration, no attendee data. A live stream sends the session out to social platforms, where audience size depends on each platform and Riverside collects nothing about viewers. A webinar keeps viewers inside Riverside behind a registration form, the only mode that captures names, emails and attendance.

The choice follows the goal. For reach on channels you already own, a stream on Grow covers it. For a lead list with attendance flags, only a webinar produces one. Speakers in every mode record locally on their own tracks, so the replay you edit later is built from full-quality files rather than the broadcast feed, whichever way the audience watched.

Set up a live stream on Grow

Destinations are connected once, in Studio settings under the Live Stream tab, from a computer browser. Hosts can then start the stream from a computer or the mobile app, but the app cannot add destinations. Riverside sets no limit on the number of destinations, though some platforms add their own, as the list below shows. Each platform brings its own rules, and most first-stream failures come from them:

• YouTube needs a channel verified for at least 24 hours and owned by the Google account you connect; otherwise use RTMP.
• LinkedIn takes one account or page at a time, scheduled events only, 4 hours per event and titles under 75 characters.
• Twitch accepts one Riverside studio per Twitch account at a time.
• Instagram goes through custom RTMP and needs a professional account.
• Custom RTMP works with any site that accepts RTMP or RTMPS, but cannot be scheduled; create a fresh stream key for each broadcast.

Streams go out at 720p by default and can be raised to 1080p, the ceiling. Expect 20 to 30 seconds of delay before video appears on a destination. A small Riverside logo sits on every stream until you hide it in the same settings tab, a toggle all three streaming plans have. Scheduled streams are created in the Planner and started by joining the event from the project page, not from the studio. You can also stream portrait and landscape at once, one orientation per destination, which helps when TikTok sits next to YouTube. Orientation locks once you are live.

Run the show: producers, backstage, scenes and chat

A live broadcast needs someone at the controls who stays off camera. On Grow and above, account members with host access can join as internal producers: they start and stop recordings, set up the stream, and never appear in it, even with camera and mic on, though their screen shares and presentations do. Inviting an outside producer, such as a freelancer, is Business only. Producers are unlimited and not recorded. Backstage, also Grow and above, lets the host pull a guest out of the main feed; that guest stops recording, is muted, still watches, and gets a new track when brought back.

Scenes handle the visual side. Each studio holds up to 20 saved studio scenes, switched with a Shift-plus-key shortcut, visible only to hosts and producers, and added before the recording or stream begins. They do not carry over to the editor. Omnichat pulls comments from YouTube, X, Twitch and Facebook Pages and Profiles into one panel, where you reply or put a comment on screen. It skips LinkedIn and TikTok. Facebook Groups and RTMP connections are left out too. On-screen comments are limited to 200 characters and replace any lower-third banner while shown.

Build a webinar that collects leads

Webinars run from a computer browser on the Webinar and Business plans, set up by the account owner, admins, directors or editors. You schedule one in the Planner and choose between two entry modes. A registration form asks for first name, last name and email by default, plus custom fields, and keeps referrer, UTM and custom-field data, though UTM is not captured when people register through the embedded registration widget. A direct session link instead asks for name and email at the door; it cannot be combined with a form for the same event, captures no UTM data, and sends only follow-up emails.

On the Webinar plan the form is customizable, but several controls stay locked. Blocking email domains, requiring a company address, editing the consent notice, changing the sender name and translating notification emails are Business only, and every email is sent from a Riverside.fm address. Recurring webinars schedule up to 50 sessions, each with its own registration link, while a series uses one registration and one join link for all sessions. Both send reminders one day and one hour before each session, plus follow-ups to attendees and to no-shows. Lobby branding starts on the Webinar plan.

Inside the studio, the interactive tools depend on the right switches. Q&A needs both audience registration and public chat; it can auto-flag chat messages containing a question mark and accept anonymous questions. Polls allow 150-character questions with up to 10 options and cannot be relaunched once ended. Post-webinar surveys take up to 25 questions. The AI Q&A assistant drafts answers from up to 10 sources you add and never sends one by itself. Live studio captions are English only. For a pre-recorded session, the Media Board takes video files of up to 5 GB or 2 hours each, uploaded up to 10 at a time.

After the webinar: data, CRM and on-demand replays

Q&A data downloads as a CSV on the Webinar plan, and registrant files include attendance rate, duration and join link. One help page marks the registration file and poll-result downloads as Business features, so confirm both before you promise them to sales. HubSpot connects on the Webinar plan, account-wide and one HubSpot account at a time; it syncs registration and attendance every 15 to 30 minutes before the event and once more after it ends. Survey answers never reach the CRM. Salesforce, Marketo and webinar webhooks are Business features. The Business API's registrant endpoints are only on some Business plans, through your customer success manager.

On-demand replays turn a recording into an evergreen event. The Webinar plan can publish up to 5 on-demand webinars, drafts excluded, and Business has no cap.^[2] Each one has no limit on registrants or viewers, which is the practical way past the 100-seat ceiling on live sessions. The trade-off is real. Riverside sends no registration or reminder emails for on-demand events, webhooks ignore them, and only Business can embed one on its own website. Registrant tracking and export work on both plans, so the lead list keeps growing after the live date.

Limits and costs to plan around

Three limits end events badly. A stream stops automatically at 8 hours, with no warning in the studio.^[3] Live streaming also counts toward the monthly separate-track download hours, 20 on Grow and 25 on Webinar, reset monthly with no rollover, so long streams eat hours you may need for podcast tracks.^[4] And the 100-registrant cap is enforced at join time, not at sign-up. Riverside also shows no total-viewer count after a stream, and none at all for RTMP, LinkedIn or X channels.

The jump between the two tiers is the real decision. Stepping up from streaming to webinars adds $54 a month on monthly billing, or $540 a year on annual billing, by our arithmetic. Annual billing on the Webinar plan saves $240 a year against twelve monthly payments, but commits $948 up front. For a short campaign, month-to-month wins: nine months cost $891 and ten cost $990, so monthly billing is cheaper for up to nine months of use. Upgrades apply immediately and charge the difference. Trials last 14 days, need a card and charge on day 15 unless cancelled; billing rules and cancellation steps are in our Riverside pricing guide.

StreamYard's Advanced plan, at $68.99 a month billed yearly or $88.99 billed monthly, includes webinars for 100 viewers and 8 stream destinations. Restream sells webinars as an add-on at $99 or $299 a month on top of a plan. Wistia puts webinars on separate plans at $429 a month billed annually or $537 billed monthly, for 500 attendees and 90-minute streams. Vimeo adds webinars of 100 registrants, 12 hours each, on its Advanced plan at $75 a seat a month billed annually or $125 billed monthly; because it is priced per seat, confirm the total at checkout. Our Riverside vs StreamYard comparison sets the streaming side by side.

The bottom line

Riverside is a recording studio first, and its audience tools follow that design. Grow is enough to stream a show to channels you already own. The Webinar plan is the minimum once you need a registration list, Q&A, polls and HubSpot, and 100 live seats is a small room. Bigger crowds mean a Business quote, or on-demand replays with no viewer cap. Check the 8-hour stream limit and your download hours against your longest event.