404 Media no paywall: “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….

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.”…