How Session Channels Work for Virtual Events
Channels are an amazing way to create a second schedule of content in your virtual event portal, meant to provide an option for attendees who want to stick around on one screen for an extended period of time instead of clicking through sessions. Although that is the intended use-case, we've seen events use the Channels function for all sorts of creative applications, including creating two variants of their schedules in two different languages.
At the end of the day, Channels are functionally no different from Sessions in your virtual event portal, in fact, they pull from the exact same data source. Identical to the way the Showcase is essentially a secondary Exhibit Hall where the intended use-case is to separate academic/poster style exhibits from corporate/sponsor style exhibits.
So what we generally see events use the Channels section for is to embed continuous streams for sessions. For example, if you're using the same Zoom meeting/webinar or RTMP stream to broadcast all your individual sessions, you may drop it into a container channel session and have individual speakers flow in and out of the same stream source. For attendees who want a more active virtual event experience, they'd use the Sessions section and select each session individually so that they can participate in session-specific experiences like chat, Q&A, surveys, personalized schedules, and more.
Step 1 - Enable the Channels Section
Visit the Experiences > Virtual section in your PheedLoop dashboard, and select Enable Channels Section. You must have the sessions modules purchased in order for this to show up in the virtual event portal, the same way you'd need it when activating the Sessions section.
Step 2 - Designate Sessions as Channel Sessions
To separate sessions in your PheedLoop dashboard out between the Sessions and Channels sections of your virtual event portal, simply select the Channel Session option for any session in your dashboard when editing the session. That's all! Head over to your virtual event portal to see your session in the Channels section.
