Decades from now what kind of legacy stories will the “founders” of WebinarTV tell their grandchildren? “This was my contribution to the world, remember me for it.”
I had read about this sleazy outfit from 404 Media in This Company Is Secretly Turning Your Zoom Meetings into AI Podcasts (it’s listed as for paying subscribers only but I am a freebie account and I read the full story in my email, there are ways to jump the wall but I leave that to the reader.)
WebinarTV, a company that bills itself as “a search engine for the best webinars,” is secretly scanning the internet for Zoom meeting links, recording the calls, and turning them into AI-generated podcasts for profit. In some cases, people only found out that their Zoom calls were recorded once WebinarTV reached out to them directly to say their call was turned into a podcast in an attempt to promote WebinarTV’s services.
WebinarTV claims to host more than 200,000 webinars. It’s not clear how it’s recording so many Zoom calls without permission, but in some cases the stolen videos posted to WebinarTV can put call participants at risk.
As part of the frog in the warm bath, yet one more slathering of enshittification is just another log on the poop pile, right. I smirked and thought, “wow that is crappy.” But then again, it does not really meet the definition because WebinarTV just skipped the first step of as a platform “they are good to their users” they just started with step 3 “they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves.”
But I heard from my work colleagues at Open Education Global that they had gotten one of those notifications about recordings of CCCOER webinars taken and put up on WebinarTV. So of course, they did the natural step to follow the link the notification email provides to remove their webinar. That’s rationale, but it’s also just wiping one corner of the poop pile with a kleenex. The pile remains, 200,000+ stolen zoom recordings high.
Ah, but I had my own taste Tuesday. I hosted a zoom webinar at noon my time, and the first time in a while I set it up with a registration link to attend and also recorded the session to the cloud. Technically, this is a “public” webinar because the link to register is on our event page.
Copyright laws and various flavor licenses aside, the present of a public link implies that they can just take a recording of this webinar for their own use. The webinar ended around 1:10 my time, and a scant 20 minutes letter I get this email from one Sarah Blair, VP of Communications at WebinarTV. It arrived before I even got my notification from zoom that my cloud recording was ready.
Hi,
I’ve reviewed OER Under the Hood with LibreTexts and set up your
On Demandpage, along with a new feature called Chapters. Chapters are designed to entice more people to watch your webinar by highlighting interesting topics covered during the session.Note: WebinarTV is designed to promote and market public webinars. If you don’t want to participate, go here and click the Remove link in the lower left corner. Your webinar will be automatically removed, and future webinars avoided.
Sarah Blair
VP of Communications, WebinarTV.usTo help spread the word, here’s a ready-to-use message you can copy and paste to your attendees:
email from Webinar TV, 20 minutes after the end of my webinar. Links like this are dead because I killed them.
___________________________________________
Missed the live session? You can now watch the full webinar OnDemand, complete with chapters that make it easy to jump right to the parts that matter most:Here
___________________________________________
Reminder: WebinarTV is for public webinars. If you’re the host and don’t wish to appear,click this linkand hit Remove. The webinar will be removed, and upcoming ones avoided.
My first reaction was, “Wow, Sarah, you have uncanny skills- you ‘reviewed’ this 70 minute webinar in less than 20 minutes.” Note that the email was not sent to me, it was sent to the email address our organization uses to log on to zoom. I do not recall us ever being told by Zoom that this is how they protect their customer’s accounts.
This is what I saw (the link is gone, I made the screenshot for my records)
You will notice that they are displaying the names/images of participants.
Just for fun, I did download the AI generated “preview”, this is most exciting, eh?
Hell yes, I did follow that link and clicked Remove. Who the bleep would not (hmm, I guess 200000 other people).
Since Sarah was so nice to watch my webinar, and do all this work to slop some AI on it, I decided to write her back.
Sarah,
I am confused how you “reviewed” this webinar considering your email arrived before I got my own cloud recording. We are a not for profit educational organization, and this event was open only to registered participants. I do not see your name on the registration record.
Therefore this recording is illegal and I am asking for information to be shared with our investigation team exactly how WebinarTV is recording our webinars without permission.
And ****** yes I am clicking to remove, but we expect a full explanation reply on how exactly you are taking our content.
My email reply to Sarah Blair. Hang on, this will be fun.
Sarah must have been busy reviewing other stolen webinars, but she did find time to write me back the next day. Gee.
Hi Alan,
Thank you for your email. I see you have removed your webinar.
Please allow up to 24 hours for this to fully take effect.
If you ever decide to expand your webinar audience and take advantage of valuable automated features—such as translation into eleven languages, chapter creation, preview clips, and searchable content within your webinar—we’d be happy to support you.These services are available at no cost, so feel free to reach out anytime.NOTE: WebinarTV is dedicated to promoting and marketing public webinars. If you’re hosting a private webinar or meeting, approve registrants or send direct invites, issue unique join links, use a passcode, and admit only verified attendees.
Kind regards,
Look, Sarah replied, it’s like we are real people in conversation
Sarah Blair
VP Communications, WebinarTV – The Best Webinars
Sarah’s email reply actually included her “photo” which looks directly out of https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/ I gave it the Google Images search for a match, but came up with not much.
she does not seem to exist in LinkedIn she has a LinkedIn profile almost as sparse as mine — or other social media. Her LinkedIn has no image, but an indication “she” lives in San Diego. Oh, she graduated from the University of Vermont in 2013 with a Bachelor of Arts in Media and Communication Studies. She has zero LinkedIn Posts and zero followers, so she’s doing as well as I am in the LinkedIn rankings.
Next I am digging into web searches for graduates from University of Vermont in 2013, not finding a list of graduates, but do note that the father on one graduate named Simeon gave the graduation speech that did inlcude music (that was Wynton Marsalis). How deep can I dig?
Hmmm, I find a searchable directory of graduation photos for the University of Vermont and enter last name Blair and the year 2013. There it is! Proof photos of UV graduate Sara Blair. Do you see anything unusual?
So putting aside my growing question that Sarah Blair is an AI construct, “her” reply to me is strange- they actually describe what they do as some kind of “service” like they are some kind Great Benefactors akin to Ghandi.
But pay attention to this “tip” from Sarah:
If you’re hosting a private webinar or meeting, approve registrants or send direct invites, issue unique join links, use a passcode, and admit only verified attendees.
Just because you set up registration, it does not protect your webinar. You actually have to do extra workl of approving registrations or verifying attendees, adding special links/passcodes to “protect” your events from being taken by WebinarTV., You have to create barriers of access for event participation. This is not enshittification it is total shit.
I am not done with you, Sarah. I am the dog who does not drop the bone. I replied back.
Hello Sarah,
We did not ask for nor desire such services. What you are saying is that all Zoom users for meetings must put more restrictions on access to events to prevent unwanted harvesting of our content?
Your “service” should be opt-in while you force busy organizers like us to opt out of unwanted taking of our content.
I might suggest you consider a more honorable business model- this is exploitive and inappropriate.
Kind regards
Alan
Hmmm, want to take any bets that “Sarah” will reply? Maybe apologize? Hah (now I am more sure that “she” is some agentic AI blob)
The bigger question is- how the bleep are they doing this? From my own look at patterns, they are able to do this for zoom sessions that are recorded to the “cloud”.
Most people will assume that they are somehow registering bots to attend events and record, like notetaking ones. This is not what’s happening, IMHO.
What does Zoom have to say> The 404 Media article includes a reply they got as email”
“We are aware of reports involving independent third-party services such as WebinarTV.us / MeetingTV.us that appear to capture and redistribute content from online meetings,” a Zoom spokesperson told me in an email. “These services are not affiliated with Zoom, and the activity described is not the result of a vulnerability or security issue within Zoom’s platform.”
Zoom said that based on its review WebinarTV accesses meetings using links that have been shared publicly, then records the sessions using browser extension or “other tools.”
“Because these recordings occur on the participant’s device and outside of Zoom’s environment, no platform—including Zoom—has the technical ability to fully prevent third-party screen recording,” the spokesperson said.
https://www.404media.co/this-company-is-secretly-turning-your-zoom-calls-into-ai-podcasts/
This does not shine well on Zoom. It’s their platform, and their response is a Family Circus shrug of “Not Me”.
A detailed report “Zooming Out: WebinarTV’s Rampant Scraping of Online Meetings” linked from the 404 Media article is by CyberAlberta guesses that browser addons for calendars or events is the likely source that is being exploited by WebinarTV. It still baffles me how getting the webinar link enables the hole for a recording to be made without permission.
Even if it is not technically illegal, it is on a human level, slimy. What they do is “Create” this podcast called The Phil And Amy Show. Look! It’s Phil! and Amy!
Just listen to these hip and smooth podcasters, just a sample:
Hmmm Phil and Amy sound… so familiar! I’d bet a box of milkbones that these are the NotebookLLM dynamic duo synthetic podcasters- compare them to the ones I assembled in this post
Hi Phil! Hi Amy! It’s a “deep dive!” “Totally”, “100%”, “that’s amazing”
So you will find tons of social posts complaining “my webinar was stolen” but the total poopification is no one will take responsibility or build some ethical stand out of dog poop that says this is a Good thing to do.
And “Sarah” if you even are human, my message to you:
The service of my angry blog posts are available at no cost, so feel free to reach out anytime. NOTE: CogDogBlog is dedicated to playful posts about dogs and remix media but also for calling out crappy web practices. If you’re a company spawning some bullshit about a service based on takijng content from innocent people without asklng permission, either put up with our anger and vile disgust with you or just get the ***** off the web. You are crapping on it majorly.
With love, CogDogBlog
All I can do is rant and make noise. If you get an email from Sarah Blair, fire more back at “her.” And make more noise about this barge of web poop called WebinarTV.
Featured Image: A composite image MADE by me in Photoshop, not spar out of some GenAI vending machine. Based on pexels image Retro TV set in dried grass by Anete Lusina used under pexels Free to use. On the screen is Class Reunions Zoom Meeting flickr photo by Joe Shlabotnik shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-SA 2.0) license along with the WebinarTV logo lifted from their web site (if they are going to copy my webinar withut asking I am taking their wretched logo), and the crowning touch is Wikimedia Commons image Dog excrement on the street in detail.jpg by Rkoblizek shared CC BY-SA. If I read the license leaves correctly, my image is CC BY-NC-SA. But please steal it. Cause that’s what passes for a “service” these days.
That’s a really unsettling thought – it’s easy to see how those kinds of companies could lose sight of the value they’re providing to attendees.
“I am the dog who does not drop the bone.” ? I’m winding down my day and you just gave me such a laugh with so many of the lines in this post. You’re cracking me up while simultaneously horrifying me. What on earth?