Castr Audience turns your player into an interactive space. Viewers can chat, ask questions, vote in polls, and send reactions, while you moderate everything from a single console and collect viewer emails as leads. This guide walks through enabling the feature and configuring each tab, then shows what your viewers see.
What Castr Audience does
Castr Audience adds an engagement panel next to your video and gives you the tools to run it:
Live chat, Q&A, polls, and reactions inside the player.
A host moderation console — pin a call-to-action, filter profanity, block links, ban viewers, clear the chat or the whole room, and archive or export the conversation.
Email (lead) capture — ask viewers for their email in the player, optionally require it before they can chat, and deliver every capture to a webhook or export it as a CSV.
The feature lives under your stream's Audience tab and is organized into four sub-tabs: Live room, Panel setup, Email capture, and Contacts.
Enabling Audience
Open your stream and go to the Audience tab.
You'll see a Castr audience / Legacy chat box switch. Keep Castr audience selected to use the full engagement panel described in this guide. (Legacy chat box is the older, chat-only experience.)
Turn on the toggle on the right so the header reads Enabled · Castr audience.
While Audience is switched off, the header shows Disabled and the Live room reads "The live room is not available." Turn on the switch and the moderation console — chat, Q&A, polls, and the room controls — opens under the Live room tab.
Tip: Configure Panel setup and Email capture first, then use Live room to run the session while you're on air.
Panel setup — choose your features and look
The Panel setup tab controls which engagement tools appear in the player and how the panel looks.
Features
Toggle each on or off:
Live chat — viewers can post messages during the stream.
Q&A — viewers submit questions and upvote each other's, so the best ones rise to the top.
Polls — you run polls from the Live room and viewers vote in the player.
Reactions — floating emoji reactions, aggregated so they stay lightweight even at scale.
Allow anonymous viewers — when on, anyone can use the panel. When off, the panel only appears for viewers carrying a paywall-signed identity — so on a stream without a paywall, that effectively means nobody. Leave this on unless you're gating the stream behind a Castr paywall.
Slow mode — the number of seconds a viewer must wait between messages. Enter
0to turn it off. Set a value and click Save; the change applies immediately, even to a room that's already live.
Appearance
Set the colours for the audience panel in your player. Viewers see the change on their next player load.
Choose a preset: Dark, Light, or Blue, or pick Custom to set your own.
Buttons and links use your player theme colour rather than the preset accent, so they stay consistent with your branding.
The Preview on the right shows how the Chat, Q&A, and Polls tabs will look, including pinned messages and viewer chat.
Email capture — collect leads from the player
The Email capture tab lets you ask viewers for their email inside the player and route each capture wherever you need it. What the form collects appears on the Contacts tab.
When to ask
Choose how aggressively to prompt for an email:
Off — never ask.
Optional — show the form, but viewers can skip it.
Required to chat — viewers must leave an email before posting in chat or Q&A. Watching and reading chat are never blocked.
Required to watch — viewers must submit an email before the stream plays.
You can also turn on Also ask for a name to add a name field to the form. The email is always asked for.
Customizing the form text
Write the form in any language. Any field you leave blank falls back to the default shown in grey.
Field | What it controls | Limit |
Form title | The heading at the top of the form | 120 characters |
Name field label | Placeholder for the name input | 40 characters |
Email field label | Placeholder for the email input | 40 characters |
Button text | The submit button label | 30 characters |
Consent text | The agreement line shown near the button | 200 characters |
Privacy policy link | Where the form's privacy link points | — |
The privacy policy link is optional. Leave it blank and the form links to Castr's standard privacy policy; enter your own URL to point viewers to your policy instead.
Delivery webhook (optional)
Turn on Delivery webhook to send each new capture to your endpoint as it happens, so emails land in your CRM or mailing list without polling.
Enter your Endpoint URL (for example,
https://example.com/hooks/captures).Optionally add a Signing secret so you can verify that incoming requests really came from Castr.
Click Save webhook.
Nothing is stored until you save, and switching the toggle off removes a saved webhook.
Live room — your moderation console
The Live room tab is where you run the session while you're on air. The header shows the connection state (for example, Connected · no viewers yet) and running counts of messages, questions, and reactions.
Room controls
Across the top of the room:
Archive — save a copy of the room's activity.
Export — download the conversation.
Clear chat — remove the current chat messages.
Clear room — reset the entire room. (Shown in red — use with care.)
Call-to-action
A call-to-action (CTA) is a card pinned above the chat that every viewer in the room sees — use it to point people at a product, a signup, or a donation page while you're live. Until you set one, the room shows "No call-to-action is live."
Publishing a CTA
Click Set call-to-action to open the editor. Publishing shows the card to everyone in the room immediately and replaces any card that's already up. Fill in:
Label — the sentence on the card, up to 80 characters (for example, "Learn more here").
Button text — the button label, up to 20 characters (for example, "Checkout").
Link — where the button sends viewers. It must be https; the room refuses anything else.
Button colour (optional) — pick a colour or enter a hex value (for example,
#2e63d6). Leave it empty and the button wears the panel's accent colour, or click Use panel accent to snap it back to that colour.
Click Publish to everyone to go live, or Cancel to discard.
Managing a live CTA
Once published, the card sits at the top of the Live room showing its label, when it went live (for example, "Live for every viewer since 11:07 AM"), and its link. From here you can:
Watch a running clicks count to gauge engagement.
Edit the card to change its text, link, or colour — republishing replaces the current card for everyone.
Remove the card to take it down for all viewers.
Moderation
Profanity filter — automatically hides offensive language.
Block links — prevents viewers from posting URLs.
Banned viewers — open the list of viewers you've removed to review or manage them.
Chatting as the host
Switch between the Chat and Polls views. Use the Say something as the host… box at the bottom to post directly into the room, and run polls from the Polls view.
Contacts — manage captured emails
The Contacts tab collects every email submitted through the player's capture form. Viewers who submit the form appear here and in the CSV export.
Click Export CSV to download all captured contacts.
Erasing an address removes every capture of it from this stream — this is what to reach for when a viewer asks for their data to be deleted.
Until any emails come in, the tab reads "No contacts yet."
What your viewers see
On the player side, the engagement panel sits to the right of the video with Chat and Polls tabs (plus Q&A if enabled) and a viewer count such as 1 watching. A row of reaction emojis (👍 ❤️ 😂 🎉 😮 👏) lets viewers react without typing.
When email capture is enabled, viewers are prompted to Choose a name to join the chat, with fields for their name and email address and a checkbox to opt in to updates about future streams, alongside a link to your privacy policy. Depending on your setting, they can Join or choose Not now to skip. If the stream isn't live, the video area simply shows Stream Offline while the panel stays available.
Quick setup checklist
Open the Audience tab, select Castr audience, and turn the toggle on.
In Panel setup, enable the features you want (chat, Q&A, polls, reactions) and set your appearance.
In Email capture, decide whether and when to ask for emails, customize the form, and (optionally) add a delivery webhook.
Go live, then use Live room to moderate, pin a call-to-action, and chat as the host.
Review and export your leads from Contacts.