Hi Team,
We tried raising this through normal support channels and had no success.
See below:
Issue identified
We are reaching out regarding a significant issue that has arisen with the Zoom API, which is affecting our reporting processes. Specifically, we are unable to retrieve recording-only viewers via the ‘Get session attendance report’ API, which impacts our ability to accurately report total watch time as designed and discussed in previous meetings with Zoom.
To clarify, here’s how we currently use the API:
- We call the ‘Get session attendance report’ endpoint to retrieve all session attendance.
- Within the attendees array, we reference the following fields:
- ‘duration_spent_in_session’
- ‘recording_view_duration’
- ‘live_streaming_view_duration’
- We sum these fields to calculate ‘Total Watch Time’ for each attendee.
The issue we’ve discovered is that attendees who watch only the recording—meaning they do not attend the live session, but access the recording later—are not included in the results of the ‘Get session attendance report’ API call. They are simply filtered out.
While we are able to generate a custom report manually for each event to obtain this data, this process is not scalable (requiring a new report to be generated for each event), and was not anticipated based on our understanding of the API documentation and our previous communications with Zoom. It appears there may be unexpected filtering occurring in the “standard” report on the Zoom backend.
Additionally, not including recording only viewers excludes an entire subset of “attendance”, that cannot be retrieved through any other standard API report. This issue also seems to affect your “Standard Reports” (e.g. session attendance report) that you can run from Zoom Events web interface.
Next steps
If you could provide any guidance as soon as possible on whether this is a known limitation or a bug, and any information about potential fixes or timelines, it would be greatly appreciated. Additionally, is there a plan to include recording-only viewers in the API report, or is there an alternative endpoint we should be using?
Please let us know if you need further details or if a meeting tomorrow would help clarify the requirements. We have sample events that we can share from our development account that exhibit the problem, and we are able to consistently reproduce this issue across all events we have run.