WARNING to Zoom Webinar Hosts: Don't Use the New "Shared Content Only" Feature

[Dave31]

You may have noticed that Zoom recently released a new "Shared Content Only" view mode that webinar hosts can use in "Follow Host View" mode to hide all panelist video tiles and show only the shared content (like slides or any other screenshare).  It's a very useful new feature that was designed to let webinar hosts have more control over what their attendees are seeing.  There are definitely lots of use cases where a webinar host may want to hide all of the video tiles, especially during transitions between presentation or program segments.

HOWEVER... The problem is that the "Shared Content Only" view will NOT work for many of your attendees.  If attendees are using the browser-based version of Zoom, or if they have an older version of the Zoom desktop client, the video tiles WILL NOT disappear for them when the webinar host switches to "Shared Content Only" view.  As you might imagine, this can cause a lot of embarassing problems if the host THINKS they are hiding all of the panelist video when in fact a whole bunch of attendees are still seeing the video.

Zoom never bothered to tell their customers that this new feature does not work across all Zoom attendee versions.  And, even worse, after being told about this problem they apparently have no plans to fix it (this is what I've been told via a support ticket).

So - webinar hosts - don't use the "Shared Content Only" feature unless all of your attendees are using the most current version of the Zoom desktop client or the mobile app (of course, it's impossible to know this).  Since Zoom hasn't bothered telling their customers about this, hopefully this message will be seen by some and prevent potential embarassment.

It's really a shame that Zoom released a new feature that wasn't properly developed or tested.  If it actually worked correctly, it would be a very useful feature for webinar hosts.  As it stands now, it's pretty much useless if it doesn't work across the board for all attendees.

[Ray_Harwood · Accepted solution]

Thanks for the alert, @Dave31.  You definitely found an issue that people need to be aware of.

What's interesting to me is that this menu item needed to be created at all. The same effect can easily be done when sharing a screen by:

1. Setting the Attendee View to Standard, and
2. Turning off all Panelist/Host cameras.

The statement by Zoom support that "they apparently have no plans to fix it" may be true, but this problem will eventually fix itself, once the Quarterly Lifecycle Policy catches up to Zoom V6.2.10, where this feature was introduced in the November 18, 2024 release.

Organizations that want to utilize this feature among their users internally can specify a minimum update to V6.2.10 and force-update their organization's devices.

[YaBoiB]

Hello @Dave31 , 

 This will be addressed. There is nothing to "fix" necessarily, but we will work to let users know that this functionality works on a certain version of Zoom software. Browser-based Zoom sessions have always had certain limitations that are listed in KB0065520 support documentation. Please let me know if there is anything further that I can do to assist you.