A turnstile is an email-capture form embedded inside a video player that pauses playback until the viewer enters their email address. The name is a deliberate metaphor — the viewer doesn't have to enter, but the path forward only opens after they do. Most professional video hosts (Wistia, Vidyard, Vimeo on the higher tiers) offer turnstiles as a built-in feature.
The interesting thing about turnstiles, and the reason I use them carefully, is that they trade short-term completion rate for higher-quality leads. A turnstile placed at the start of a video drops most casual viewers; a turnstile placed two-thirds of the way in catches viewers who are already invested and willing to pay an email address to keep watching. That second placement converts at noticeably higher rates and, more importantly, produces leads that match against the CRM as people who actually engaged with the content.
I rarely place a turnstile at the start of a video. The exception is gated content where the video is genuinely the value being exchanged for the email — a workshop replay, a paid-tier preview, a long-form interview. For everything else, mid-roll or end-of-video placement preserves the funnel and produces better-qualified leads.
The operational piece worth getting right is the CRM handoff. A turnstile that drops captured emails into a spreadsheet is a missed opportunity; one that creates a CRM contact tagged with the video title, the timestamp the form fired at, and any UTM data from the page is a real attribution surface. The lead quality difference between "watched 80% of the pricing video" and "unknown source" is the entire point of running the form in the first place.