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.
Tom Rademacher, a teacher and editor, told me he organized a Zoom call for educators and education advocates in the months after Donald Trump was elected to discuss keeping kids safe from ICE.
“I very intentionally did not record the webinar since we’d be talking politics and there were some local electeds and district leaders that were on,” Rademacher told me. “There were definitely people on there who it would have been bad politically and professionally to be, especially at the time, linked to being anti-Trump in an education space.”
Rademacher received an email on October 7, 2025, from WebinarTV VP of communications Sarah Blair, whose profile image appears to be AI-generated and who has no online presence.
“Your webinar is featured on the Phil & Amy Show,” Blair said in her email. “They talk about the highlights from your webinar – without giving away too much – to entice viewers. To listen to the show, click Highlights tab on the OnDemand page or click here.”
The link sent Rademacher to a page on WebinarTV.us which featured a full recording of the Zoom recording, an AI-generated video summary of the meeting, “chapters” that sent the viewers to different parts of the meeting, and an AI-generated episode of the “Phil & Amy Show,” in which two AI-generated personalities discuss the content of the call, including quips and rapport between Phil and Amy.
“By suddenly having the whole meeting be public so you could see what [participants] were saying, after all the talk about safe spaces, it just felt super gross,” Rademacher told me.
Rademacher asked Blair how she got the recording of the meeting and asked that WebinarTV take it down, which it did.
“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,” Blair told Rademacher.
“Search, browsing and playback are all free for viewers,” a page on WebinarTV’s site says. “There is no cost for a webinar to be included in WebinarTV. There are additional optional marketing opportunities available for hosts who want additional interest and attendees for their webinar.”
Searching for WebinarTV and Sarah Blair shows that other people online had very similar experiences to Rademacher. On Reddit and Linkedin, people say they found out that Zoom meetings they thought were private were uploaded to WebinarTV once they got a similar pitch from Blair. I searched for 404 Media on WebinarTV and found that they had recorded a Zoom call Joseph did with the Freedom of the Press Foundation last year. Freedom of the Press told me that it didn’t give WebinarTV permission to record the call but that it “concluded that it is more of a nuisance than a threat and probably inevitable given that our events are public.”
I clicked on a random Zoom call hosted on WebinarTV’s site about “AI, Equity & Access to Justice” hosted by the Ontario Association of Black Paralegals.
“This is really odd/unsettling to learn about,” Dayna Cornwall, a project manager at the National Self-Represented Litigants Project, who hosted the Zoom call, told me when I asked her if she knew it was recorded and uploaded to WebinarTV. “We were not aware that our webinar was being recorded by Webinar.TV, and have never heard of it before.”
“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.
All the people I talked to who found their Zoom meetings on WebinarTV did not use strict privacy settings, and shared links to the meeting because they invited a large number of people to attend.
People who complained about WebinarTV on Linkedin also speculated that WebinarTV was finding the meetings by scraping the web for Zoom links. Freedom of the Press Foundation speculated that WebinarTV is using a Zoom API to scrape for public webinars, but noted that this would probably violate Zoom’s terms of service, which doesn’t allow people to use the API “To scrape, build databases, or otherwise create copies of any data accessed or obtained using the Zoom APIs by your Application.”
CyberAlberta, an organization dedicated to improving cybersecurity in the Canadian province, published a report about WebinarTV when it noticed that it was stealing its Zoom calls.
“CyberAlberta’s investigation found that WebinarTV primarily gains initial access to Zoom webinars via third-party browser extensions. These extensions can access webinar links when a user either inadvertently grants calendar permissions—exposing meeting invitations—or willfully submits meeting details into the WebinarTV platform,” the report said. “WebinarTV is believed to leverage a range of browser extensions that provide functionalities such as AI powered transcription and note-taking tools, or tools to automate the joining of online meetings. The platform mostly relies on the widespread use of these tools by end users, rather than operating them directly. However, at least one of the known extensions is listed on the Chrome Web Store as developed by WebinarTV.”
We’re not naming the plugins because we were unable to independently verify that they were actually serving WebinarTV’s scraping of Zoom calls. None of the companies that produce these plugins responded to requests for comment.
WebinarTV did not respond to a request for comment, but its FAQ page states that: “WebinarTV is a DMCA compliant service and a good internet citizen. We only want to promote webinars that want more viewers. If a copyright owner or a person authorized to act on the owner’s behalf requests content to be removed, then WebinarTV will promptly remove it. Send requests to remove@webinartv.us Please be sure and include the URL to the content in question and an admission that you are the copyright owner or a person authorized to act on the owner’s behalf.”
The Zoom spokesperson said that users who want to keep their calls private should avoid publicly posting meeting links when possible, require registration and manually approve registrants to carefully vet participants, and enable available deterrence features such as watermarking.