Our customers use Cloudflare Calls, Stream, and Images to build live, interactive, and real-time experiences for their users. We want to reduce friction by making it easier to get data into our products. This also means providing transparent pricing, so customers can be confident that costs make economic sense for their business, especially as they scale.
Today, we’re introducing four new improvements to help you build media applications with Cloudflare:
Cloudflare Calls is in open beta with transparent pricing
Cloudflare Stream has a Live Clipping API to let your viewers instantly clip from ongoing streams
Cloudflare Images has a pre-built upload widget that you can embed in your application to accept uploads from your users
Cloudflare Images lets you crop and resize images of people at scale with automatic face cropping
Build real-time video and audio applications with Cloudflare Calls
Cloudflare Calls is now in open beta, and you can activate it from your dashboard. Your usage will be free until May 15, 2024. Starting May 15, 2024, customers with a Calls subscription will receive the first terabyte each month for free, with any usage beyond that charged at $0.05 per real-time gigabyte. Additionally, there are no charges for inbound traffic to Cloudflare.
Live Instant Clipping: create clips from live streams and recordings
Live broadcasts often include short bursts of highly engaging content within a longer stream. Creators and viewers alike enjoy being able to make a “clip” of these moments to share across multiple channels. Being able to generate that clip rapidly enables our customers to offer instant replays, showcase key pieces of recordings, and build audiences on social media in real-time.
Today, Cloudflare Stream is launching Live Instant Clipping in open beta for all customers. With the new Live Clipping API, you can let your viewers instantly clip and share moments from an ongoing stream – without re-encoding the video.
When planning this feature, we considered a typical user flow for generating clips from live events. Consider users watching a stream of a video game: something wild happens and users want to save and share a clip of it to social media. What will they do?
First, they’ll need to be able to review the preceding few minutes of the broadcast, so they know what to clip. Next, they need to select a start time and clip duration or end time, possibly as a visualization on a timeline or by scrubbing the video player. Finally, the clip must be available quickly in a way that can be replayed or shared across multiple platforms, even after the original broadcast has ended.
That ideal user flow implies some heavy lifting in the background. We now offer a manifest to preview recent live content in a rolling window, and we provide the timing information in that response to determine the start and end times of the requested clip relative to the whole broadcast. Finally, on request, we will generate on-the-fly that clip as a standalone video file for easy sharing as well as an HLS manifest for embedding into players.
Live Instant Clipping is available in beta to all customers starting today! Live clips are free to make; they do not count toward storage quotas, and playback is billed just like minutes of video delivered. To get started, check out the Live Clipping API in developer documentation.
Integrate Cloudflare Images into your application with only a few lines of code
Building applications with user-uploaded images is even easier with the upload widget, a pre-built, interactive UI that lets users upload images directly into your Cloudflare Images account.
Many developers use Cloudflare Images as an end-to-end image management solution to support applications that center around user-generated content, from AI photo editors to social media platforms. Our APIs connect the frontend experience – where users upload their images – to the storage, optimization, and delivery operations in the backend.
But building an application can take time. Our team saw a huge opportunity to take away as much extra work as possible, and we wanted to provide off-the-shelf integration to speed up the development process.
With the upload widget, you can seamlessly integrate Cloudflare Images into your application within minutes. The widget can be integrated in two ways: by embedding a script into a static HTML page or by installing a package that works with your favorite framework. We provide a ready-made Worker template that you can deploy directly to your account to connect your frontend application with Cloudflare Images and authorize users to upload through the widget.
Optimize images of people with automatic face cropping for Cloudflare Images
Cloudflare Images lets you dynamically manipulate images in different aspect ratios and dimensions for various use cases. With face cropping for Cloudflare Images, you can now crop and resize images of people’s faces at scale. For example, if you’re building a social media application, you can apply automatic face cropping to generate profile picture thumbnails from user-uploaded images.
Our existing gravity parameter uses saliency detection to set the focal point of an image based on the most visually interesting pixels, which determines how the image will be cropped. We expanded this feature by using a machine learning model called RetinaFace, which classifies images that have human faces. We’re also introducing a new zoom parameter that you can combine with face cropping to specify how closely an image should be cropped toward the face.
As we’re working to build the next set of media tools, we’d love to hear what you’re building for your users. Come say hi to us on Discord. You can also learn more by visiting our developer documentation for Calls, Stream, and Images.
Stream Live lets users easily scale their live-streaming apps and websites to millions of creators and concurrent viewers while focusing on the content rather than the infrastructure — Stream manages codecs, protocols, and bit rate automatically.
For Speed Week this year, we introduced a closed beta of Low-Latency HTTP Live Streaming (LL-HLS), which builds upon the high-quality, feature-rich HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) protocol. Lower latency brings creators even closer to their viewers, empowering customers to build more interactive features like chat and enabling the use of live-streaming in more time-sensitive applications like live e-learning, sports, gaming, and events.
Today, in celebration of Birthday Week, we’re opening this beta to all customers with even lower latency. With LL-HLS, you can deliver video to your audience faster, reducing the latency a viewer may experience on their player to as little as three seconds. Low Latency streaming is priced the same way, too: $1 per 1,000 minutes delivered, with zero extra charges for encoding or bandwidth.
Broadcast with latency as low as three seconds.
LL-HLS is an extension of the HLS standard that allows us to reduce glass-to-glass latency — the time between something happening on the broadcast end and a user seeing it on their screen. That includes factors like network conditions and transcoding for HLS and adaptive bitrates. We also include client-side buffering in our understanding of latency because we know the experience is driven by what a user sees, not when a byte is delivered into a buffer. Depending on encoder and player settings, broadcasters' content can be playing on viewers' screens in less than three seconds.
On the left, OBS Studio broadcasting from my personal computer to Cloudflare Stream. On the right, watching this livestream using our own built-in player playing LL-HLS with three second latency!
Same pricing, lower latency. Encoding is always free.
Our addition of LL-HLS support builds on all the best parts of Stream including simple, predictable pricing. You never have to pay for ingress (broadcasting to us), compute (encoding), or egress. This allows you to stream with peace of mind, knowing there are no surprise fees and no need to trade quality for cost. Regardless of bitrate or resolution, Stream costs \$1 per 1,000 minutes of video delivered and \$5 per 1,000 minutes of video stored, billed monthly.
Stream also provides both a built-in web player or HLS/DASH manifests to use in a compatible player of your choosing. This enables you or your users to go live using the same protocols and tools that broadcasters big and small use to go live to YouTube or Twitch, but gives you full control over access and presentation of live streams. We also provide access control with signed URLs and hotlinking prevention measures to protect your content.
Powered by the strength of the network
And of course, Stream is powered by Cloudflare's global network for fast delivery worldwide, with points of presence within 50ms of 95% of the Internet connected population, a key factor in our quest to slash latency. We ingest live video close to broadcasters and move it rapidly through Cloudflare’s network. We run encoders on-demand and generate player manifests as close to viewers as possible.
Getting started with LL-HLS
Getting started with Stream Live only takes a few minutes, and by using Live Outputs for restreaming, you can even test it without changing your existing infrastructure. First, create or update a Live Input in the Cloudflare dashboard. While in beta, Live Inputs will have an option to enable LL-HLS called “Low-Latency HLS Support.” Activate this toggle to enable the new pipeline.
Stream will automatically provide the RTMPS and SRT endpoints to broadcast your feed to us, just as before. For the best results, we recommend the following broadcast settings:
Codec: h264
GOP size / keyframe interval: 1 second
Optionally, configure a Live Output to point to your existing video ingest endpoint via RTMPS or SRT to test Stream while rebroadcasting to an existing workflow or infrastructure.
Stream will automatically provide RTMPS and SRT endpoints to broadcast your feed to us as well as an HTML embed for our built-in player.
This connection information can be added easily to a broadcast application like OBS to start streaming immediately:
During the beta, our built-in player will automatically attempt to use low-latency for any enabled Live Input, falling back to regular HLS otherwise. If LL-HLS is being used, you’ll see “Low Latency” noted in the player.
During this phase of the beta, we are most closely focused on using OBS to broadcast and Stream’s built-in player to watch — which uses HLS.js under the hood for LL-HLS support. However, you may test the LL-HLS manifest in a player of your own by appending ?protocol=llhls to the end of the HLS manifest URL. This flag may change in the future and is not yet ready for production usage; watch for changes in DevDocs.
Sign up today
Low-Latency HLS is Stream Live’s latest tool to bring your creators and audiences together. All new and existing Stream subscriptions are eligible for the LL-HLS open beta today, with no pricing changes or contract requirements — all part of building the fastest, simplest serverless live-streaming platform. Join our beta to start test-driving Low-Latency HLS!
Designed with developers in mind, Cloudflare Stream provides a seamless, integrated workflow that simplifies video streaming for creators and platforms alike. With features like Stream Live and creator management, customers have been looking for ways to streamline storage management.
Today, August 11, 2023, Cloudflare Stream is introducing scheduled deletion to easily manage video lifecycles from the Stream dashboard or our API, saving time and reducing storage-related costs. Whether you need to retain recordings from a live stream for only a limited time, or preserve direct creator videos for a set duration, scheduled deletion will simplify storage management and reduce costs.
Stream scheduled deletion
Scheduled deletion allows developers to automatically remove on-demand videos and live recordings from their library at a specified time. Live inputs can be set up with a deletion rule, ensuring that all recordings from the input will have a scheduled deletion date upon completion of the stream.
Let’s see how it works in those two configurations.
Getting started with scheduled deletion for on-demand videos
Whether you run a learning platform where students can upload videos for review, a platform that allows gamers to share clips of their gameplay, or anything in between, scheduled deletion can help manage storage and ensure you only keep the videos that you need. Scheduled deletion can be applied to both new and existing on-demand videos, as well as recordings from completed live streams. This feature lets you specify a specific date and time at which the video will be deleted. These dates can be applied in the Cloudflare dashboard or via the Cloudflare API.
Cloudflare dashboard
From the Cloudflare dashboard, select Videos under Stream
Select a video
Select Automatically Delete Video
Specify a desired date and time to delete the video
Click Submit to save the changes
Cloudflare API
The Stream API can also be used to set the scheduled deletion property on new or existing videos. In this example, we’ll create a direct creator upload that will be deleted on December 31, 2023:
For more information on live inputs and how to configure deletion policies in our API, refer to the documentation.
Getting started with automated deletion for Live Input recordings
We love how recordings from live streams allow those who may have missed the stream to catch up, but these recordings aren’t always needed forever. Scheduled recording deletion is a policy that can be configured for new or existing live inputs. Once configured, the recordings of all future streams on that input will have a scheduled deletion date calculated when the recording is available. Setting this retention policy can be done from the Cloudflare dashboard or via API operations to create or edit Live Inputs:
Cloudflare Dashboard
From the Cloudflare dashboard, select Live Inputs under Stream
Select Create Live Input or an existing live input
Select Automatically Delete Recordings
Specify a number of days after which new recordings should be deleted
Click Submit to save the rule or create the new live input
Cloudflare API
The Stream API makes it easy to add a deletion policy to new or existing inputs. Here is an example API request to create a live input with recordings that will expire after 30 days:
For more information on live inputs and how to configure deletion policies in our API, refer to the documentation.
Try out scheduled deletion today
Scheduled deletion is now available to all Cloudflare Stream customers. Try it out now and join our Discord community to let us know what you think! To learn more, check out our developer docs. Stay tuned for more exciting Cloudflare Stream updates in the future.
One of the things we prioritize at Cloudflare is enabling developers to build their applications on our developer platform with ease. We’re excited to share a collection of ready-made templates that’ll help you start building your next application on Workers. We want developers to get started as quickly as possible, so that they can focus on building and innovating and avoid spending so much time configuring and setting up their projects.
Cloudflare Workers enables you to build applications with exceptional performance, reliability, and scale. We are excited to share a collection of templates that helps you get started quickly and give you an idea of what is possible to build on our developer platform.
We have made available a set of starter templates highlighting different use cases of Workers. We understand that you have different ideas you will love to build on top of Workers and you may have questions or wonder if it is possible. These sets of templates go beyond the convention ‘Hello, World’ starter. They’ll help shape your idea of what kind of applications you can build with Workers as well as other products in the Cloudflare Developer Ecosystem.
We are excited to introduce a new collection of starter templates workers.new/templates. This shortcut will serve you a collection of templates that you can immediately start using to build your next application.
Cloudflare Workers Template Collection
How to use Cloudflare Workers templates
We created this collection of templates to support you in getting started with Workers. Some examples listed showcase a use-case with a combination of multiple Cloudflare developer platform products to build applications similar to ones you might use every day. We know that Workers are being used today for different use-cases, we want to showcase some of them to you.
One example to highlight is a template that lets you accept payment for video content. It is powered by Pages Functions, Cloudflare Stream and Stripe Checkout. This app shows how you can use Cloudflare Workers with external payment and authentication systems to create a logged-in experience, without ever having to manage a database or persist any state yourself.
Once a user has paid, Stripe Checkout redirects to a URL that verifies a token from Stripe, and generates a signed URL using Cloudflare Stream to view the video. This signed URL is only valid for a specified amount of time, and access can be restricted by country or IP address.
To use the template, you need to either click the deploy with Workers button or open the template with Stackblitz.
The Deploy with Workers button will redirect you to a page where you can authorize GitHub to deploy a fork of the repository using GitHub actions while opening with StackBlitz creates a new fork of the template for you to start working with.
Deploy to Workers Demo
These templates also comes bundled with additional features I would like to share with you:
We added a deploy button to all templates listed in the templates repository and the collection website, so you can quickly get up to speed with your code. The deploy with Workers button lets you deploy your code in under five minutes, it uses a GitHub action powered with Cloudflare Workers to do this.
GitHub Repository with Deploy to Workers Button
Support for Test Driven Development
As developers, we need to write tests for our code to ensure we’re shipping quality production grade software and also ensure that our code is bug-free. We support writing tests in Workers using the Wrangler unstable_dev API to write integration and end-to-end tests. We want to enable not just the developer experience but also nudge developers to follow best practices and prioritize TDD in development. We configured a number of templates to support integration tests against a local server, this will serve as a template to help you set up tests in your projects.
Here’s an example using Wrangler’s unstable_dev API and Vitest test framework to test the code written in an example ‘Hello worker’ starter template:
We announced StackBlitz’s partnership with Cloudflare Workers during Platform Week early this year. We believe a developer’s experience should be of utmost priority because we want them to build with ease on our developer platform.
StackBlitz is an online development platform for building web applications. It is powered by WebContainers, the first WebAssembly-based operating system which boots Node.js environments in milliseconds, securely within your browser tab.
We made it even easier to get started with Workers with an integrated Open with StackBlitz button for each starter template, making it easier to create a fork of a template and the great thing is you only need a web browser to build your application.
Everything we’ve highlighted in this post, all leads to one thing – How can we create a better experience for developers getting started with Workers. We introduce these ready-made templates to make you more efficient, bring you a wholesome developer experience and help improve your time to deployment. We want you to spend less time getting started with building on the Workers developer platform, so what are you waiting for?
Next Steps
You can start building your own Worker today using the available templates provided in the templates collection to help you get started. If you would like to contribute your own templates to the collection, be sure to send in a pull request we’re more than happy to review and add to the growing collection. Share what you have built with us in the #builtwith channel on our Discord community. Make sure to follow us on Twitter or join our Discord Developers Community server.
Consumer hardware is pushing the limits of consumers’ bandwidth.
VR headsets support 5760 x 3840 resolution — 22.1 million pixels per frame of video. Nearly all new TVs and smartphones sold today now support 4K — 8.8 million pixels per frame. It’s now normal for most people on a subway to be casually streaming video on their phone, even as they pass through a tunnel. People expect all of this to just work, and get frustrated when it doesn’t.
Consumer Internet bandwidth hasn’t kept up. Even advanced mobile carriers still limit streaming video resolution to prevent network congestion. Many mobile users still have to monitor and limit their mobile data usage. Higher Internet speeds require expensive infrastructure upgrades, and 30% of Americans still say they often have problems simply connecting to the Internet at home.
We talk to developers every day who are pushing up against these limits, trying to deliver the highest quality streaming video without buffering or jitter, challenged by viewers’ expectations and bandwidth. Developers building live video experiences hit these limits the hardest — buffering doesn’t just delay video playback, it can cause the viewer to get out of sync with the live event. Buffering can cause a sports fan to miss a key moment as playback suddenly skips ahead, or find out in a text message about the outcome of the final play, before they’ve had a chance to watch.
Today we’re announcing a big step towards breaking the ceiling of these limits — support in Cloudflare Stream for the AV1 codec for live videos and their recordings, available today to all Cloudflare Stream customers in open beta. Read the docs to get started, or watch an AV1 video from Cloudflare Stream in your web browser. AV1 is an open and royalty-free video codec that uses46% less bandwidth than H.264, the most commonly used video codec on the web today.
What is AV1, and how does it improve live video streaming?
Every piece of information that travels across the Internet, from web pages to photos, requires data to be transmitted between two computers. A single character usually takes one byte, so a two-page letter would be 3600 bytes or 3.6 kilobytes of data transferred.
One pixel in a photo takes 3 bytes, one each for red, green and blue in the pixel. A 4K photo would take 8,294,400 bytes, or 8.2 Megabytes. A video is like a photo that changes 30 times a second, which would make almost 15 Gigabytes per minute. That’s a lot!
To reduce the amount of bandwidth needed to stream video, before video is sent to your device, it is compressed using a codec. When your device receives video, it decodes this into the pixels displayed on your screen. These codecs are essential to both streaming and storing video.
Video compression codecs combine multiple advanced techniques, and are able to compress video to one percent of the original size, with your eyes barely noticing a difference. This also makes video codecs computationally intensive and hard to run. Smartphones, laptops and TVs have specific media decoding hardware, separate from the main CPU, optimized to decode specific protocols quickly, using the minimum amount of battery life and power.
Every few years, as researchers invent more efficient compression techniques, standards bodies release new codecs that take advantage of these improvements. Each generation of improvements in compression technology increases the requirements for computers that run them. With higher requirements, new chips are made available with increased compute capacity. These new chips allow your device to display higher quality video while using less bandwidth.
AV1 takes advantage of recent advances in compute to deliver video with dramatically fewer bytes, even compared to other relatively recent video protocols like VP9 and HEVC.
AV1 leverages the power of new smartphone chips
One of the biggest developments of the past few years has been the rise of custom chip designs for smartphones. Much of what’s driven the development of these chips is the need for advanced on-device image and video processing, as companies compete on the basis of which smartphone has the best camera.
This means the phones we carry around have an incredible amount of compute power. One way to think about AV1 is that it shifts work from the network to the viewer’s device. AV1 is fewer bytes over the wire, but computationally harder to decode than prior formats. When AV1 was first announced in 2018, it was dismissed by some as too slow to encode and decode, but smartphone chips have become radically faster in the past four years, more quickly than many saw coming.
AV1 hardware decoding is already built into the latest Google Pixel smartphones as part of the Tensor chip design. The Samsung Exynos 2200 and MediaTek Dimensity 1000 SoC mobile chipsets both support hardware accelerated AV1 decoding. It appears that Google will require that all devices that support Android 14 support decoding AV1. And AVPlayer, the media playback API built into iOS and tvOS, now includes an option for AV1, which hints at future support. It’s clear that the industry is heading towards hardware-accelerated AV1 decoding in the most popular consumer devices.
With hardware decoding comes battery life savings — essential for both today’s smartphones and tomorrow’s VR headsets. For example, a Google Pixel 6 with AV1 hardware decoding uses only minimal battery and CPU to decode and play our test video:
AV1 encoding requires even more compute power
Just as decoding is significantly harder for end-user devices, it is also significantly harder to encode video using AV1. When AV1 was announced in 2018, many doubted whether hardware would be able to encode it efficiently enough for the protocol to be adopted quickly enough.
To demonstrate this, we encoded the 4K rendering of Big Buck Bunny (a classic among video engineers!) into AV1, using an AMD EPYC 7642 48-Core Processor with 256 GB RAM. This CPU continues to be a workhorse of our compute fleet, as we have written about previously. We used the following command to re-encode the video, based on the example in the ffmpeg AV1 documentation:
Using a single core, encoding just two seconds of video at 30fps took over 30 minutes. Even if all 48 cores were used to encode, it would take at minimum over 43 seconds to encode just two seconds of video. Live encoding using only CPUs would require over 20 servers running at full capacity.
Special-purpose AV1 software encoders like rav1e and SVT-AV1 that run on general purpose CPUs can encode somewhat faster than libaom-av1 with ffmpeg, but still consume a huge amount of compute power to encode AV1 in real-time, requiring multiple servers running at full capacity in many scenarios.
Cloudflare Stream encodes your video to AV1 in real-time
At Cloudflare, we control both the hardware and software on our network. So to solve the CPU constraint, we’ve installed dedicated AV1 hardware encoders, designed specifically to encode AV1 at blazing fast speeds. This end to end control is what lets us encode your video to AV1 in real-time. This is entirely out of reach to most public cloud customers, including the video infrastructure providers who depend on them for compute power.
Encoding in real-time means you can use AV1 for live video streaming, where saving bandwidth matters most. With a pre-recorded video, the client video player can fetch future segments of video well in advance, relying on a buffer that can be many tens of seconds long. With live video, buffering is constrained by latency — it’s not possible to build up a large buffer when viewing a live stream. There is less margin for error with live streaming, and every byte saved means that if a viewer’s connection is interrupted, it takes less time to recover before the buffer is empty.
Stream lets you support AV1 with no additional work
AV1 has a chicken or the egg dilemma. And we’re helping solve it.
Companies with large video libraries often re-encode their entire content library to a new codec before using it. But AV1 is so computationally intensive that re-encoding whole libraries has been cost prohibitive. Companies have to choose specific videos to re-encode, and guess which content will be most viewed ahead of time. This is particularly challenging for apps with user generated content, where content can suddenly go viral, and viewer patterns are hard to anticipate.
This has slowed down the adoption of AV1 — content providers wait for more devices to support AV1, and device manufacturers wait for more content to use AV1. Which will come first?
With Cloudflare Stream there is no need to manually trigger re-encoding, re-upload video, or manage the bulk encoding of a large video library. This is a unique approach that is made possible by integrating encoding and delivery into a single product — it is not possible to encode on-demand using the old way of encoding first, and then pointing a CDN at a bucket of pre-encoded files.
We think this approach can accelerate the adoption of AV1. Consider a video app with millions of minutes of user-generated video. Most videos will never be watched again. In the old model, developers would have to spend huge sums of money to encode upfront, or pick and choose which videos to re-encode. With Stream, we can help anyone incrementally adopt AV1, without re-encoding upfront. As we work towards making AV1 Generally Available, we’ll be working to make supporting AV1 simple and painless, even for videos already uploaded to Stream, with no special configuration necessary.
Open, royalty-free, and widely supported
At Cloudflare, we are committed to open standards and fighting patent trolls. While there are multiple competing options for new video codecs, we chose to support AV1 first in part because it is open source and has royalty-free licensing.
Other encoding codecs force device manufacturers to pay royalty fees in order to adopt their standard in consumer hardware, and have been quick to file lawsuits against competing video codecs. The group behind the open and royalty-free VP8 and VP9 codecs have been pushing back against this model for more than a decade, and AV1 is the successor to these codecs, with support from all the biggest technology companies, both software and hardware. Beyond its technical accomplishments, AV1 is a clear message from the industry that the future of video encoding should be open, royalty-free, and free from patent litigation.
Try AV1 right now with your live stream or live recording
Support for AV1 is currently in open beta. You can try using AV1 on your own live video with Cloudflare Stream right now — just add the ?betaCodecSuggestion=av1 query parameter to the HLS or DASH manifest URL for any live stream or live recording created after October 1st in Cloudflare Stream. Read the docs to get started. If you don’t yet have a Cloudflare account, you can sign up here and start using Cloudflare Stream in just a few minutes.
We also have a recording of a live video, encoded using AV1, that you can watch here. Note that Safari does not yet support AV1.
We encourage you to try AV1 with your test streams, and we’d love your feedback. Join our Discord channel and tell us what you’re building, and what kinds of video you’re interested in using AV1 with. We’d love to hear from you!
Creators and broadcasters expect to be able to go live from anywhere, on any device. Viewers expect “live” to mean “real-time”. The protocols that power most live streams are unable to meet these growing expectations.
In talking to developers building live streaming into their apps and websites, we’ve heard near universal frustration with the limitations of existing live streaming technologies. Developers in 2022 rightly expect to be able to deliver low latency to viewers, broadcast reliably, and use web standards rather than old protocols that date back to the era of Flash.
Today, we’re excited to announce in open beta that Cloudflare Stream now supports live video streaming over WebRTC, with sub-second latency, to unlimited concurrent viewers. This is a new feature of Cloudflare Stream, and you can start using it right now in the Cloudflare Dashboard — read the docs to get started.
WebRTC with Cloudflare Stream leapfrogs existing tools and protocols, exclusively uses open standards with zero dependency on a specific SDK, and empowers any developer to build both low latency live streaming and playback into their website or app.
The status quo of streaming live video is broken
The status quo of streaming live video has high latency, depends on archaic protocols and is incompatible with the way developers build apps and websites. A reasonable person’s expectations of what the Internet should be able to deliver in 2022 are simply unmet by the dominant set of protocols carried over from past eras.
Viewers increasingly expect “live” to mean “real-time”. People want to place bets on sports broadcasts in real-time, interact and ask questions to presenters in real-time, and never feel behind their friends at a live event.
In practice, the HLS and DASH standards used to deliver video have 10+ seconds of latency. LL-HLS and LL-DASH bring this down to closer to 5 seconds, but only as a hack on top of the existing protocol that delivers segments of video in individual HTTP requests. Sending mini video clips over TCP simply cannot deliver video in real-time. HLS and DASH are here to stay, but aren’t the future of real-time live video.
Creators and broadcasters expect to be able to go live from anywhere, on any device.
In practice, people creating live content are stuck with a limited set of native apps, and can’t go live using RTMP from a web browser. Because it’s built on top of TCP, the RTMP broadcasting protocol struggles under even the slightest network disruption, making it a poor or often unworkable option when broadcasting from mobile networks. RTMP, originally built for use with Adobe Flash Player, was last updated in 2012, and while Stream supports the newer SRT protocol, creators need an option that works natively on the web and can more easily be integrated in native apps.
Developers expect to be able to build using standard APIs that are built into web browsers and native apps.
In practice, RTMP can’t be used from a web browser, and creating a native app that supports RTMP broadcasting typically requires diving into lower-level programming languages like C and Rust. Only those with expertise in both live video protocols and these languages have full access to the tools needed to create novel live streaming client applications.
We’re solving this by using new open WebRTC standards: WHIP and WHEP
WebRTC is the real-time communications protocol, supported across all web browsers, that powers video calling services like Zoom and Google Meet. Since inception it’s been designed for real-time, ultra low-latency communications.
While WebRTC is well established, for most of its history it’s lacked standards for:
Ingestion — how broadcasters should send media content (akin to RTMP today)
Egress — how viewers request and receive media content (akin to DASH or HLS today)
As a result, developers have had to implement this on their own, and client applications on both sides are often tightly coupled to provider-specific implementations. Developers we talk to often express frustration, having sunk months of engineering work into building around a specific vendor’s SDK, unable to switch without a significant rewrite of their client apps.
At Cloudflare, our mission is broader — we’re helping to build a better Internet. Today we’re launching not just a new feature of Cloudflare Stream, but a vote of confidence in new WebRTC standards for both ingestion and egress. We think you should be able to start using Stream without feeling locked into an SDK or implementation specific to Cloudflare, and we’re committed to using open standards whenever possible.
For ingestion, WHIP is an IETF draft on the Standards Track, with many applications already successfully using it in production. For delivery (egress), WHEP is an IETF draft with broad agreement. Combined, they provide a standardized end-to-end way to broadcast one-to-many over WebRTC at scale.
Cloudflare Stream is the first cloud service to let you both broadcast using WHIP and playback using WHEP — no vendor-specific SDK needed. Here’s how it works:
Cloudflare Stream is already built on top of the Cloudflare developer platform, using Workers and Durable Objects running on Cloudflare’s global network, within 50ms of 95% of the world’s Internet-connected population.
Our WebRTC implementation extends this to relay WebRTC video through our network. Broadcasters stream video using WHIP to the point of presence closest to their location, which tells the Durable Object where the live stream can be found. Viewers request streaming video from the point of presence closest to them, which asks the Durable Object where to find the stream, and video is routed through Cloudflare’s network, all with sub-second latency.
Using Durable Objects, we achieve this with zero centralized state. And just like the rest of Cloudflare Stream, you never have to think about regions, both in terms of pricing and product development.
While existing ultra low-latency streaming providers charge significantly more to stream over WebRTC, because Stream runs on Cloudflare’s global network, we’re able to offer WebRTC streaming at the same price as delivering video over HLS or DASH. We don’t think you should be penalized with higher pricing when choosing which technology to rely on to stream live video. Once generally available, WebRTC streaming will cost $1 per 1000 minutes of video delivered, just like the rest of Stream.
What does sub-second latency let you build?
Ultra low latency unlocks interactivity within your website or app, removing the time delay between creators, in-person attendees, and those watching remotely.
Developers we talk to are building everything from live sports betting, to live auctions, to live viewer Q&A and even real-time collaboration in video post-production. Even streams without in-app interactivity can benefit from real-time — no sports fan wants to get a text from their friend at the game that ruins the moment, before they’ve had a chance to watch the final play. Whether you’re bringing an existing app or have a new idea in mind, we’re excited to see what you build.
If you can write JavaScript, you can let your users go live from their browser
While hobbyist and professional creators might take the time to download and learn how to use an application like OBS Studio, most Internet users won’t get past this friction of new tools, and copying RTMP keys from one tool to another. To empower more people to go live, they need to be able to broadcast from within your website or app, just by enabling access to the camera and microphone.
Cloudflare Stream with WebRTC lets you build live streaming into your app as a front-end developer, without any special knowledge of video protocols. And our approach, using the WHIP and WHEP open standards, means you can do this with zero dependencies, with 100% your code that you control.
Go live from a web browser with just a few lines of code
You can go live right now, from your web browser, by creating a live input in the Cloudflare Stream dashboard, and pasting a URL into the example linked below.
import WHIPClient from "./WHIPClient.js";
const url = "<WEBRTC_URL_FROM_YOUR_LIVE_INPUT>";
const videoElement = document.getElementById("input-video");
const client = new WHIPClient(url, videoElement);
This example uses an example WHIP client, written in just 100 lines of Javascript, using APIs that are native to web browsers, with zero dependencies. But because WHIP is an open standard, you can use any WHIP client you choose. Support for WHIP is growing across the video streaming industry — it has recently been added to Gstreamer, and one of the authors of the WHIP specification has written a Javascript client implementation. We intend to support the full WHIP specification, including supporting Trickle ICE for fast NAT traversal.
Play a live stream in a browser, with sub-second latency, no SDK required
Once you’ve started streaming, copy the playback URL from the live input you just created, and paste it into the example linked below.
import WHEPClient from './WHEPClient.js';
const url = "<WEBRTC_PLAYBACK_URL_FROM_YOUR_LIVE_INPUT>";
const videoElement = document.getElementById("playback");
const client = new WHEPClient(url, videoElement);
Just like the WHIP example before, this one uses an example WHEP client we’ve written that has zero dependencies. WHEP is an earlier IETF draft than WHIP, published in July of this year, but adoption is moving quickly. People in the community have already written open-source client implementations in both Javascript, C, with more to come.
Start experimenting with real-time live video, in open beta today
WebRTC streaming is in open beta today, ready for you to use as an integrated feature of Cloudflare Stream. Once Generally Available, WebRTC streaming will be priced like the rest of Cloudflare Stream, based on minutes of video delivered and minutes stored.
Today, we’re excited to announce that Stream Live is out of beta, available to everyone, and ready for production traffic at scale. Stream Live is a feature of Cloudflare Stream that allows developers to build live video features in websites and native apps.
Since its beta launch, developers have used Stream to broadcast live concerts from some of the world’s most popular artists directly to fans, build brand-new video creator platforms, operate a global 24/7 live OTT service, and more. While in beta, Stream has ingested millions of minutes of live video and delivered to viewers all over the world.
Bring your big live events, ambitious new video subscription service, or the next mobile video app with millions of users — we’re ready for it.
Streaming live video at scale is hard
Live video uses a massive amount of bandwidth. For example, a one-hour live stream at 1080p at 8Mbps is 3.6GB. At typical cloud provider egress prices, even a little egress can break the bank.
Live video must be encoded on-the-fly, in real-time. People expect to be able to watch live video on their phone, while connected to mobile networks with less bandwidth, higher latency and frequently interrupted connections. To support this, live video must be re-encoded in real-time into multiple resolutions, allowing someone’s phone to drop to a lower resolution and continue playback. This can be complex (Which bitrates? Which codecs? How many?) and costly: running a fleet of virtual machines doesn’t come cheap.
Ingest location matters — Live streaming protocols like RTMPS send video over TCP. If a single packet is dropped or lost, the entire connection is brought to a halt while the packet is found and re-transmitted. This is known as “head of line blocking”. The further away the broadcaster is from the ingest server, the more network hops, and the more likely packets will be dropped or lost, ultimately resulting in latency and buffering for viewers.
Delivery location matters — Live video must be cached and served from points of presence as close to viewers as possible. The longer the network round trips, the more likely videos will buffer or drop to a lower quality.
Broadcasting protocols are in flux — The most widely used protocol for streaming live video, RTMPS, has been abandoned since 2012, and dates back to the era of Flash video in the early 2000s. A new emerging standard, SRT, is not yet supported everywhere. And WebRTC has only recently evolved into an option for high definition one-to-many broadcasting at scale.
The old way to solve this has been to stitch together separate cloud services from different vendors. One vendor provides excellent content delivery, but no encoding. Another provides APIs or hardware to encode, but leaves you to fend for yourself and build your own storage layer. As a developer, you have to learn, manage and write a layer of glue code around the esoteric details of video streaming protocols, codecs, encoding settings and delivery pipelines.
We built Stream Live to make streaming live video easy, like adding an <img> tag to a website. Live video is now a fundamental building block of Internet content, and we think any developer should have the tools to add it to their website or native app.
With Stream, you or your users stream live video directly to Cloudflare, and Cloudflare delivers video directly to your viewers. You never have to manage internal encoding, storage, or delivery systems — it’s just live video in and live video out.
Our network, our hardware = a solution only Cloudflare can provide
We’re not the only ones building APIs for live video — but we are the only ones with our own global network and hardware that we control and optimize for video. That lets us do things that others can’t, like sub-second glass-to-glass latency using RTMPS and SRT playback at scale.
Newer video codecs require specialized hardware encoders, and while others are beholden to the hardware limitations of public cloud providers, we’re already hard at work installing the latest encoding hardware in our own racks, so that you can deliver high resolution video with even less bandwidth. Our goal is to make what is otherwise only available to video giants available directly to you — stay tuned for some exciting updates on this next week.
Most providers limit how many destinations you can restream or simulcast to. Because we operate our own network, we’ve never even worried about this, and let you restream to as many destinations as you need.
Operating our own network lets us price Stream based on minutes of video delivered — unlike others, we don’t pay someone else for bandwidth and then pass along their costs to you at a markup. The status quo of charging for bandwidth or per-GB storage penalizes you for delivering or storing high resolution content. If you ask why a few times, most of the time you’ll discover that others are pushing their own cost structures on to you.
Encoding video is compute-intensive, delivering video is bandwidth intensive, and location matters when ingesting live video. When you use Stream, you don’t need to worry about optimizing performance, finding a CDN, and/or tweaking configuration endlessly. Stream takes care of this for you.
Free your live video from the business models of big platforms
Nearly every business uses live video, whether to engage with customers, broadcast events or monetize live content. But few have the specialized engineering resources to deliver live video at scale on their own, and wire together multiple low level cloud services. To date, many of the largest content creators have been forced to depend on a shortlist of social media apps and streaming services to deliver live content at scale.
Unlike the status quo, who force you to put your live video in their apps and services and fit their business models, Stream gives you full control of your live video, on your website or app, on any device, at scale, without pushing your users to someone else’s service.
Other platforms charge for ingestion and encoding. Many even force you to consider where you’re streaming to and from, the bitrate and frames per second of your video, and even which of their datacenters you’re using.
With Stream, encoding and ingestion are free. Other platforms charge for delivery based on bandwidth, penalizing you for delivering high quality video to your viewers. If you stream at a high resolution, you pay more.
With Stream, you don’t pay a penalty for delivering high resolution video. Stream’s pricing is simple — minutes of video delivered and stored. Because you pay per minute, not per gigabyte, you can stream at the ideal resolution for your viewers without worrying about bandwidth costs.
Other platforms charge separately for analytics, requiring you to buy another product to get metrics about your live streams.
With Stream, analytics are free. Stream provides an API and Dashboard for both server-side and client-side analytics, that can be queried on a per-video, per-creator, per-country basis, and more. You can use analytics to identify which creators in your app have the most viewed live streams, inform how much to bill your customers for their own usage, identify where content is going viral, and more.
Other platforms tack on live recordings or DVR mode as a separate add-on feature, and recordings only become available minutes or even hours after a live stream ends.
With Stream, live recordings are a built-in feature, made available instantly after a live stream ends. Once a live stream is available, it works just like any other video uploaded to Stream, letting you seamlessly use the same APIs for managing both pre-recorded and live content.
Build live video into your website or app in minutes
Cloudflare Stream enables you or your users to go live using the same protocols and tools that broadcasters big and small use to go live to YouTube or Twitch, but gives you full control over access and presentation of live streams.
Step 2: Use the RTMPS key with any live broadcasting software, or in your own native app
Copy the RTMPS URL and key, and use them with your live streaming application. We recommend using Open Broadcaster Software (OBS) to get started, but any RTMPS or SRT compatible software should be able to interoperate with Stream Live.
Enter the Stream RTMPS URL and the Stream Key from Step 1:
Step 3: Preview your live stream in the Cloudflare Dashboard
In the Stream Dashboard, within seconds of going live, you will see a preview of what your viewers will see, along with the real-time connection status of your live stream.
Step 4: Add live video playback to your website or app
For example, on iOS, all you need to do is provide AVPlayer with the URL to the HLS manifest for your live input, which you can find via the API or in the Stream Dashboard.
import SwiftUI
import AVKit
struct MyView: View {
// Change the url to the Cloudflare Stream HLS manifest URL
private let player = AVPlayer(url: URL(string: "https://customer-9cbb9x7nxdw5hb57.cloudflarestream.com/8f92fe7d2c1c0983767649e065e691fc/manifest/video.m3u8")!)
var body: some View {
VideoPlayer(player: player)
.onAppear() {
player.play()
}
}
}
struct MyView_Previews: PreviewProvider {
static var previews: some View {
MyView()
}
}
To run a complete example app in XCode, follow this guide in the Stream Developer docs.
Companies are building whole new video platforms on top of Stream
Developers want control, but most don’t have time to become video experts. And even video experts building innovative new platforms don’t want to manage live streaming infrastructure.
Switcher Studio’s whole business is live video — their iOS app allows creators and businesses to produce their own branded, multi camera live streams. Switcher uses Stream as an essential part of their live streaming infrastructure. In their own words:
“Since 2014, Switcher has helped creators connect to audiences with livestreams. Now, our users create over 100,000 streams per month. As we grew, we needed a scalable content delivery solution. Cloudflare offers secure, fast delivery, and even allowed us to offer new features, like multistreaming. Trusting Cloudflare Stream lets our team focus on the live production tools that make Switcher unique.”
While Stream Live has been in beta, we’ve worked with many customers like Switcher, where live video isn’t just one product feature, it is the core of their product. Even as experts in live video, they choose to use Stream, so that they can focus on the unique value they create for their customers, leaving the infrastructure of ingesting, encoding, recording and delivering live video to Cloudflare.
Start building live video into your website or app today
It takes just a few minutes to sign up and start your first live stream, using the Cloudflare Dashboard, with no code required to get started, but APIs for when you’re ready to start building your own live video features. Give it a try — we’re ready for you, no matter the size of your audience.
Building inclusive technology is core to the Cloudflare mission. Cloudflare Stream has supported captions for on-demand videos for several years. Soon, Stream will auto-detect embedded captions and include it in the live stream delivered to your viewers.
Thousands of Cloudflare customers use the Stream product to build video functionality into their apps. With live caption support, Stream customers can better serve their users with a more comprehensive viewing experience.
Enabling Closed Captions in Stream Live
Stream Live scans for CEA-608 and CEA-708 captions in incoming live streams ingested via SRT and RTMPS. Assuming the live streams you are pushing to Cloudflare Stream contain captions, you don’t have to do anything further: the captions will simply get included in the manifest file.
If you are using the Stream Player, these captions will be rendered by the Stream Player. If you are using your own player, you simply have to configure your player to display captions.
Currently, Stream Live supports captions for a single language during the live event. While the support for captions is limited to one language during the live stream, you can upload captions for multiple languages once the event completes and the live event becomes an on-demand video.
What is CEA-608 and CEA-708?
When captions were first introduced in 1973, they were open captions. This means the captions were literally overlaid on top of the picture in the video and therefore, could not be turned off. In 1982, we saw the introduction of closed captions during live television. Captions were no longer imprinted on the video and were instead passed via a separate feed and rendered on the video by the television set.
CEA-608 (also known as Line 21) and CEA-708 are well-established standards used to transmit captions. CEA-708 is a modern iteration of CEA-608, offering support for nearly every language and text positioning–something not supported with CEA-608.
Availability
Live caption support will be available in closed beta next month. To request access, sign up for the closed beta.
Including captions in any video stream is critical to making your content more accessible. For example, the majority of live events are watched on mute and thereby, increasing the value of captions. While Stream Live does not generate live captions yet, we plan to build support for automatic live captions in the future.
Starting today, in open beta, Cloudflare Stream supports video playback with sub-second latency over SRT or RTMPS at scale. Just like HLS and DASH formats, playback over RTMPS and SRT costs $1 per 1,000 minutes delivered regardless of video encoding settings used.
Stream is like a magic HDMI cable to the cloud. You can easily connect a video stream and display it from as many screens as you want wherever you want around the world.
What do we mean by sub-second?
Video latency is the time it takes from when a camera sees something happen live to when viewers of a broadcast see the same thing happen via their screen. Although we like to think what’s on TV is happening simultaneously in the studio and your living room at the same time, this is not the case. Often, cable TV takes five seconds to reach your home.
On the Internet, the range of latencies across different services varies widely from multiple minutes down to a few seconds or less. Live streaming technologies like HLS and DASH, used on by the most common video streaming websites typically offer 10 to 30 seconds of latency, and this is what you can achieve with Stream Live today. However, this range does not feel natural for quite a few use cases where the viewers interact with the broadcasters. Imagine a text chat next to an esports live stream or Q&A session in a remote webinar. These new ways of interacting with the broadcast won’t work with typical latencies that the industry is used to. You need one to two seconds at most to achieve the feeling that the viewer is in the same room as the broadcaster.
We expect Cloudflare Stream to deliver sub-second latencies reliably in most parts of the world by routing the video as much as possible within the Cloudflare network. For example, when you’re sending video from San Francisco on your Comcast home connection, the video travels directly to the nearest point where Comcast and Cloudflare connect, for example, San Jose. Whenever a viewer joins, say from Austin, the viewer connects to the Cloudflare location in Dallas, which then establishes a connection using the Cloudflare backbone to San Jose. This setup avoids unreliable long distance connections and allows Cloudflare to monitor the reliability and latency of the video all the way from broadcaster the last mile to the viewer last mile.
Serverless, dynamic topology
With Cloudflare Stream, the latency of content from the source to the destination is purely dependent on the physical distance between them: with no centralized routing, each Cloudflare location talks to other Cloudflare locations and shares the video among each other. This results in the minimum possible latency regardless of the locale you are broadcasting from.
We’ve tested about 500ms of glass to glass latency from San Francisco to London, both from and to residential networks. If both the broadcaster and the viewers were in California, this number would be lower, simply because of lower delay caused by less distance to travel over speed of light. An early tester was able to achieve 300ms of latency by broadcasting using OBS via RTMPS to Cloudflare Stream and pulling down that content over SRT using ffplay.
Any server in the Cloudflare Anycast network can receive and publish low-latency video, which means that you’re automatically broadcasting to the nearest server with no configuration necessary. To minimize latency and avoid network congestion, we route video traffic between broadcaster and audience servers using the same network telemetry as Argo.
On top of this, we construct a dynamic distribution topology, unique to the stream, which grows to meet the capacity needs of the broadcast. We’re just getting started with low-latency video, and we will continue to focus on latency and playback reliability as our real-time video features grow.
An HDMI cable to the cloud
Most video on the Internet uses HTTP – the protocol for loading websites on your browser to deliver video. This has many advantages, such as easy to achieve interoperability across viewer devices. Maybe more importantly, HTTP can use the existing infrastructure like caches which reduce the cost of video delivery.
Using HTTP has a cost in latency as it is not a protocol built to deliver video. There’s been many attempts made to deliver low latency video over HTTP, with some reducing latency to a few seconds, but none reach the levels achievable by protocols designed with video in mind. WebRTC and video delivery over QUIC have the potential to further reduce latency, but face inconsistent support across platforms today.
Video-oriented protocols, such as RTMPS and SRT, side-step some of the challenges above but often require custom client libraries and are not available in modern web browsers. While we now support low latency video today over RTMPS and SRT, we are actively exploring other delivery protocols.
There’s no silver bullet – yet, and our goal is to make video delivery as easy as possible by supporting the set of protocols that enables our customers to meet their unique and creative needs. Today that can mean receiving RTMPS and delivering low-latency SRT, or ingesting SRT while publishing HLS. In the future, that may include ingesting WebRTC or publishing over QUIC or HTTP/3 or WebTransport. There are many interesting technologies on the horizon.
We’re excited to see new use cases emerge as low-latency video becomes easier to integrate and less costly to manage. A remote cycling instructor can ask her students to slow down in response to an increase in heart rate; an esports league can effortlessly repeat their live feed to remote broadcasters to provide timely, localized commentary while interacting with their audience.
Creative uses of low latency video
Viewer experience at events like a concert or a sporting event can be augmented with live video delivered in real time to participants’ phones. This way they can experience the event in real-time and see the goal scored or details of what’s going happening on the stage.
Often in big cities, people who cheer loudly across the city can be heard before seeing a goal scored on your own screen. This can be eliminated by when every video screen shows the same content at the same time.
Esports games, large company meetings or conferences where presenters or commentators react real time to comments on chat. The delay between a fan making a comment and them seeing the reaction on the video stream can be eliminated.
Online exercise bikes can provide even more relevant and timely feedback from the live instructors, adding to the sense of community developed while riding them.
Participants in esports streams can be switched from a passive viewer to an active live participant easily as there is no delay in the broadcast.
Security cameras can be monitored from anywhere in the world without having to open ports or set up centralized servers to receive and relay video.
Getting Started
Get started by using your existing inputs on Cloudflare Stream. Without the need to reconnect, they will be available instantly for playback with the RTMPS/SRT playback URLs.
If you don’t have any inputs on Stream, sign up for $5/mo. You will get the ability to push live video, broadcast, record and now pull video with sub-second latency.
You will need to use a computer program like FFmpeg or OBS to push video. To playback RTMPS you can use VLC and FFplay for SRT. To integrate in your native app, you can utilize FFmpeg wrappers for native apps such as ffmpeg-kit for iOS.
RTMPS and SRT playback work with the recently launched custom domain support, so you can use the domain of your choice and keep your branding.
The last two years have given rise to hundreds of live streaming platforms. Most live streaming platforms enable their creators to go live by providing them with a server and an RTMP/SRT key that they can configure in their broadcasting app.
Until today, even if your live streaming platform was called live-yoga-classes.com, your users would need to push the RTMPS feed to live.cloudflare.com. Starting today, every Stream account can configure its own domain in the Stream dashboard. And your creators can broadcast to a domain such as push.live-yoga-classes.com.
This feature is available to all Stream accounts, including self-serve customers at no additional cost. Every Cloudflare account with a Stream subscription can add up to five ingest domains.
Secure CNAMEing for live video ingestion
Cloudflare Stream only supports encrypted video ingestion using RTMPS and SRT protocols. These are secure protocols and, similar to HTTPS, ensure encryption between the broadcaster and Cloudflare servers. Unlike non-secure protocols like RTMP, secure RTMP (or RTMPS) protects your users from monster-in-the-middle attacks.
In an unsecure world, you could simply CNAME a domain to another domain regardless of whether you own the domain you are sending traffic to. Because Stream Live intentionally does not support insecure live streams, you cannot simply CNAME your domain to live.cloudflare.com. So we leveraged other Cloudflare products such as Spectrum to natively support custom-branded domains in the Stream Live product without making the live streams less private for your broadcasters.
Configuring Custom Domain for Live Ingestion
To begin configuring your custom domain, add the domain to your Cloudflare account as a regular zone.
Add a zone to your Cloudflare account
Next, CNAME the domain to live.cloudflare.com.
CNAME the zone to live.cloudflare.com
Assuming you have a Stream subscription, visit the Inputs page and click on the Settings icon:
Click on Settings icon on Live Inputs page
Next, add the domain you configured in the previous step as a Live Ingest Domain:
Add Custom Ingest Domain
If your domain is successfully added, you will see a confirmation:
Confirmation of domain being added as an ingest domain
Once you’ve added your ingest domain, test it by changing your existing configuration in your broadcasting software to your ingest domain. You can read the complete docs and limitations in the Stream Live developer docs.
What’s Next
Besides the branding upside — you don’t have to instruct your users to configure a domain such as live.cloudflare.com — custom domains help you avoid vendor lock-in and seamless migration. For example, if you have an existing live video pipeline that you are considering moving to Stream Live, this makes the migration one step easier because you no longer have to ask your users to change any settings in their broadcasting app.
A natural next step is to support custom keys. Currently, your users must still use keys that are provided by Stream Live. Soon, you will be able to bring your own keys. Custom domains combined with custom keys will help you migrate to Stream Live with zero breaking changes for your end users.
Creator platforms across the world use Cloudflare Stream to rapidly build video experiences into their apps. These platforms serve a diverse range of creators, enabling them to share their passion with their beloved audience. While working with creator platforms, we learned that many Stream customers track video usage on a per-creator basis in order to answer critical questions such as:
“Who are our fastest growing creators?”
“How much do we charge or pay creators each month?”
“What can we do more of in order to serve our creators?”
Introducing the Creator Property
Creator platforms enable artists, teachers and hobbyists to express themselves through various media, including video. We built Cloudflare Stream for these platforms, enabling them to rapidly build video use cases without needing to build and maintain a video pipeline at scale.
At its heart, every creator platform must manage ownership of user-generated content. When a video is uploaded to Stream, Stream returns a video ID. Platforms using Stream have traditionally had to maintain their own index to track content ownership. For example, when a user with internal user ID 83721759 uploads a video to Stream with video ID 06aadc28eb1897702d41b4841b85f322, the platform must maintain a database table of some sort to keep track of the fact that Stream video ID 06aadc28eb1897702d41b4841b85f322 belongs to internal user 83721759.
With the introduction of the creator property, platforms no longer need to maintain this index. Stream already has a direct creator upload feature to enable users to upload videos directly to Stream using tokenized URLs and without exposing account-wide auth information. You can now set the creator field with your user’s internal user ID at the time of requesting a tokenized upload URL:
When the user uploads the video, the creator property would be automatically set to your internal user ID and can be leveraged for operations such as pulling analytics data for your creators.
Query By Creator Property
Setting the creator property on your video uploads is just the beginning. You can now filter Stream Analytics via the Dashboard or the GraphQL API using the creator property.
Filter Stream Analytics in the Dashboard using the Creator property
Previously, if you wanted to generate a monthly report of all your creators and the number of minutes of watch time recorded for their videos, you’d likely use a scripting language such as Python to do the following:
Call the Stream GraphQL API requesting a list of videos and their watch time
Traverse through the list of videos and query your internal index to determine which creator each video belongs to
Sum up the video watch time for each creator to get a clean report showing you video consumption grouped by the video creator
The creator property eliminates this three step manual process. You can make a single API call to the GraphQL API to request a list of creators and the consumption of their videos for a given time period. Here is an example GraphQL API query that returns minutes delivered by creator:
Stream is focused on helping creator platforms innovate and scale. Matt Ober, CTO of NFT media management platform Piñata, says “By allowing us to upload and then query using creator IDs, large-scale analytics of Cloudflare Stream is about to get a lot easier.”
Getting Started
Read the docs to learn more about setting the creator property on new and previously uploaded videos. You can also set the creator property on live inputs, so the recorded videos generated from the live event will already have the creator field populated.
Being able to filter analytics is just the beginning. We can’t wait to enable more creator-level operations, so you can spend more time on what makes your idea unique and less time maintaining table stakes infrastructure.
SRT is a new and modern live video transport protocol. It features many improvements to the incumbent popular video ingest protocol, RTMP, such as lower latency, and better resilience against unpredictable network conditions on the public Internet. SRT supports newer video codecs and makes it easier to use accessibility features such as captions and multiple audio tracks. While RTMP development has been abandoned since at least 2012, SRT development is maintained by an active community of developers.
We don’t see RTMP use going down anytime soon, but we can do something so authors of new broadcasting software, as well as video streaming platforms, can have an alternative.
Starting today, in open beta, you can use Stream Connect as a gateway to translate SRT to RTMP or RTMP to SRT with your existing applications. This way, you can get the last-mile reliability benefits of SRT and can continue to use the RTMP service of your choice. It’s priced at $1 per 1,000 minutes, regardless of video encoding parameters.
You can also use SRT to go live on Stream Live, our end-to-end live streaming service to get HLS and DASH manifest URLs from your SRT input, and do simulcasting to multiple platforms whether you use SRT or RTMP.
Stream’s SRT and RTMP implementation supports adding or removing RTMP or SRT outputs without having to restart the source stream, scales to tens of thousands of concurrent video streams per customer and runs on every Cloudflare server in every Cloudflare location around the world.
Go live like it’s 2022
When we first started developing live video features on Cloudflare Stream earlier last year we had to decide whether to reimplement an old and unmaintained protocol, RTMP, or focus on the future and start off fresh by using a modern protocol. If we launched with RTMP, we would get instant compatibility with existing clients but would give up features that would greatly improve performance and reliability. Reimplementing RTMP would also mean we’d have to handle the complicated state machine that powers it, demux the FLV container, parse AMF and even write a server that sends the text “Genuine Adobe Flash Media Server 001” as part of the RTMP handshake.
Even though there were a few new protocols to evaluate and choose from in this project, the dominance of RTMP was still overwhelming. We decided to implement RTMP but really don’t want anybody else to do it again.
Eliminate head of line blocking
A common weakness of TCP when it comes to low latency video transfer is head of line blocking. Imagine a camera app sending videos to a live streaming server. The camera puts every frame that is captured into packets and sends it over a reliable TCP connection. Regardless of the diverse set of Internet infrastructure it may be passing through, TCP makes sure all packets get delivered in order (so that your video frames don’t jump around) and reliably (so you don’t see any parts of the frame missing). However, this type of connection comes at a cost. If a single packet is dropped, or lost in the network somewhere between two endpoints like it happens on mobile network connections or wifi often, it means the entire TCP connection is brought to a halt while the lost packet is found and re-transmitted. This means that if one frame is suddenly missing, then everything that would come after the lost video frame needs to wait. This is known as head of line blocking.
RTMP experiences head of line blocking because it uses a TCP connection. Since SRT is a UDP-based protocol, it does not experience head of line blocking. SRT features packet recovery that is aware of the low-latency and high reliability requirements of video. Similar to QUIC, it achieves this by implementing its own logic for a reliable connection on top of UDP, rather than relying on TCP.
SRT solves this problem by waiting only a little bit, because it knows that losing a single frame won’t be noticeable by the end viewer in the majority of cases. The video moves on if the frame is not re-transmitted right away. SRT really shines when the broadcaster is streaming with less-than-stellar Internet connectivity. Using SRT means fewer buffering events, lower latency and a better overall viewing experience for your viewers.
RTMP to SRT and SRT to RTMP
Comparing SRT and RTMP today may not be that useful for the most pragmatic app developers. Perhaps it’s just another protocol that does the same thing for you. It’s important to remember that even though there might not be a big improvement for you today, tomorrow there will be new video use cases that will benefit from a UDP-based protocol that avoids head of line blocking, supports forward error correction and modern codecs beyond H.264 for high-resolution video.
Switching protocols requires effort from both software that sends video and software that receives video. This is a frustrating chicken-or-the-egg problem. A video streaming service won’t implement a protocol not in use and clients won’t implement a protocol not supported by streaming services.
Starting today, you can use Stream Connect to translate between protocols for you and deprecate RTMP without having to wait for video platforms to catch up. This way, you can use your favorite live video streaming service with the protocol of your choice.
Stream is useful if you’re a live streaming platform too! You can start using SRT while maintaining compatibility with existing RTMP clients. When creating a video service, you can have Stream Connect to terminate RTMP for you and send SRT over to the destination you intend instead.
SRT is already implemented in software like FFmpeg and OBS. Here’s how to get it working from OBS:
Get started with signing up for Cloudflare Stream and adding a live input.
Protocol-agnostic Live Streaming
We’re working on adding support for more media protocols in addition to RTMP and SRT. What would you like to see next? Let us know! If this post vibes with you, come work with the engineers building with video and more at Cloudflare!
Opening night of Web Summit 2021, at the Altice Arena in Lisbon, Portugal. Photo by Sam Barnes/Web Summit
Global in-person events were back in a big way at the start of November (1-4) in Lisbon, Portugal, with Web Summit 2021 gathering more than 42,000 attendees from 128 countries. I was there to discover Internet trends and meet interesting people. What I saw was the contagious excitement of people from all corners of the world coming together for what seemed like a type of normality in a time when the Internet “is almost as important as having water”, according to Sonia Jorge from the World Wide Web Foundation.
Here’s some of what I heard in the halls.
With a lot happening on a screen, the lockdowns throughout the pandemic showed us a glimpse of what the metaverse could be, just without VR or AR headsets. Think about the way many were able to use virtual tools to work all day, learn, collaborate, order food, supplies, and communicate with friends and family — all from their homes.
While many had this experience, many others were unable to, with some talks at the event focusing on the digital divide and how “Internet access is a basic human right”, according to the grandson of Nelson Mandela — we interviewed him, and you can watch the conversation below.
The future already has some paths laid out, and many were discussed at the event.
The pandemic helped to accelerate most of them, especially by bringing more people (in some countries) to the digital world.
The CPO of Meta, Chris Cox, shared how the company previously known as Facebook has some ideas about the future of augmented reality, and how they want to see those ideas play out in the next five to 10 years. “We want to get the conversation going,” he said.
Also present at the event was Jon Vlassopulos, Global Head of Music, Roblox. He explained how virtual concerts on the video game platform could be the future of music performances, and even bring free tickets to fans of famous music stars like Adele. Stars like Zara Larsson, KSI and Ava Max have already performed on Roblox and “they’re making big money from selling digital merchandise”.
On the other hand, Paddy Cosgrave, CEO of Web Summit, says that there’s something magical about in-person big events that can’t be replicated in full online events. However, the real and virtual world can complement each other — it was announced that CES 2022 will use a combination of Web Summit online and offline software.
Web3 was another big part of the discussion, sometimes in clear sight, other times embedded in the many conversations about blockchain, NFTs and cryptocurrencies, and as a vision for a decentralized web (we’re actually working on that).
Speakers also focused on data privacy and security, ethics in AI and data protection. Ownership to the user and sovereignty were topics discussed and emphasized by Sir Tim Berners-Lee on the last day of the event.
The workplace was also a popular topic, as well as the changes it underwent in the past couple of years. We heard about the importance of diversity in the workplace, as well as the future of work — is it going to be flexible, hybrid, full remote or something in between? Speakers also mentioned The Great Resignation and the reset of people’s and organizations’ mindsets.
Using AI to hire and motivate people was also in the air, as well as big topics like the digitalization of healthcare, mental health, behaviour changes in humans (young and adult) who are more and more on the Internet and even the decentralization of financial services.
And here are some examples of the different speakers at the event we talked to:
Vice-Admiral Gouveia e Melo: Vaccination, misinformation and leadership
Portuguese Navy officer and coordinator of the Task Force for the Portugal COVID-19 vaccination plan
Portugal has achieved an 86% vaccination rate on the vice-admiral’s watch. He brought a sense of mission to a task that involved organization, focus and the use of both digital and communication tools.
The country started the vaccination process late but is now one of the countries with a higher vaccination rate in the world. We talked with the vice-admiral about how the Internet helped, but also how it created problems related to disinformation and misinformation, and we asked about the dangers of controlling speech online. Finally, we asked for bits of leadership advice.
Sonia Jorge: The need for Internet — affordable, fast and for everyone
Executive Director World Wide Web Foundation (Alliance for Affordable Internet)
“The Internet is now an essential public good that everybody needs at this time just like we need to drink water or to have electricity and shelter. We should do more to bring everyone into the digital society.”
In some countries around the world Internet access is very limited. In some places people have to go to a particular plaza to have access to the Internet — five years ago John Graham-Cumming saw something similar in Cuba. Sonia Jorge knows that very well. She is trying to bring affordable Internet to everyone and that challenge is more difficult than it appears.
She explains that the world is far behind in the UN’s goals for Internet access — today only about half of the earth’s population has any Internet access at all. But many of those who have access to the World Wide Web have limited possibilities to be online: “some have access once a month, for example.” So the digital divide is real, and it “should worry everyone”.
The pandemic caused health and economic difficulties that didn’t help the mission of bringing good, fast and reliable Internet to everyone. Nevertheless, Sonia — who is Portuguese and moved to the US to study when she was 17 — saw that many African countries like Nigeria began to realize that the Internet is really important for knowledge and also for the possibilities it opens in terms of cultural, financial and societal growth.
Sonia also highlights that there is a big disparity in the world between men and women in terms of Internet access.
David Kiron: The future of work and how AI (and philosophy) can help
Editorial director of MIT Sloan Management Review
Technology will play a significant role in the future of work. In a way, that “future” is already here, but isn’t evenly distributed — and researchers are just beginning to study it. David Kiron goes on to explain the challenge for some people to be “really seen by their leadership when you’re not in the office.”
The former senior researcher at Harvard Business School tells us how companies started valuing employees even more through the pandemic. There’s also an opportunity for different ways of work interaction through digital tools — “Zoom calls aren’t it.” He’s also worried that the pandemic caused a great reset that is driving many out of the workforce entirely: “There’s a trend of working moms opting out,” for example.
About the metaverse and a universe of universes:“If tech leaders spent more time reading philosophy they might have a better sense of where the world is going (…) more and more leaders of companies are taking on the philosopher’s role.”
And how can AI help? “Once you get AI going in a company we saw in our new study that there’s a big bump in morale, collaboration, learning and people’s sense on what they should be doing”. AI can also help better identify talent and match candidates to skills that are already represented in a company, but he also highlights that “humans play a role in all the stages of the hiring and working process.”
David Kiron explains that “if you’re not asking the right questions to your AI teams you’re going to be behind other companies that are doing better questions”. He adds that AI can help with performance, but it also helps “redefine what performance means in your organization by finding other metrics to look at.”
Ana Maiques: neuroscience & women in tech
Co-founder and CEO of neuroscience-based medical device company Neuroelectrics
We talked to Ana about the future of the Internet. She thinks moving forward there will be more fluid interfaces — not only limited to computers and smartphones, but we will have different devices that go beyond VR headsets and that will lead to new types of interactions. In the neuroscience field, she has big hopes in the technology that Neuroelectrics, her company, is developing in Barcelona, Spain. They work with devices that use non-invasive transcranial electrical stimulation to treat the brain in diseases like epilepsy, depression and Alzheimer.
Neuroelectricsis also developing a process called digital copy (for better personalized treatments) that could be useful in the future if someone develops one of these problems. But she says humankind is still very far from the dangers of something like a mind-reading device or the possibility of reading and downloading thoughts and dreams: “it’s fun to think of science fiction possibilities, but we need to act now on things and problems that are affecting us today.”
She also talks about the difficulties of being a woman in the tech business and raising money. “But little by little I see more women and that’s why it’s important to get out there and explain to women that they can do it.”
Siyabulela Mandela: The Internet is a human right
Director for Africa Journalists for Human Rights
The grandson of Nelson Mandela is on a mission to help journalists in Africa to be free to publish human rights stories. He explains how the Internet is critical for this mission and “a human rights issue”. Not only does the Internet give communities access to trustworthy information, but it also helps them become aware of their rights, gives access to financial tools and allows them to grow in our era.
He also highlights how the Internet can be misused, for example when it becomes a vehicle for misinformation, or when governments shut down Internet access to control communities — in Sudan the Internet has been cut off since October 25, 2021 (you can track that information on Cloudflare Radar).
Carlos Moedas: The light (and innovation) in Lisbon
Newly elected Mayor of Lisbon; previous European Commissioner for Research, Science and Innovation
Why is Lisbon attracting so many tech companies and talent? Carlos Moedas welcomes Cloudflare to his city — we’re growing fast in the city, and we have more than 80 job openings in the country. He also talks about why Portugal’s capital is so special and should be considered by company leaders who want to grow innovative companies. Paddy Cosgrave, from the Web Summit, told us something similar four weeks ago.
The ambition? “Make Lisbon the capital of innovation of the world” or, at least, of Europe. The new mayor also has a project called Unicorn Factory to achieve just that.
Sudarsan Reddy: Why is Cloudflare Tunnel relevant?
Cloudflare engineer from the Tunnel Team
Also, at the event was our very own engineer Sudarsan Reddy (based in Lisbon). We asked him some questions about Cloudflare Tunnel, our tunneling software that lets you quickly secure and encrypt application traffic to any type of infrastructure, so you can hide your server IP addresses, block direct attacks, and get back to delivering great applications.
Sudarsan focuses on what Tunnel is, why it is relevant, how it works and examples of situations where it can make a difference.
Yusuf Sherwani: Addiction treated online
Co-founder & CEO, Quit Genius
Yusuf graduated as a doctor from Imperial College School of Medicine, in London, but joined two passions, healthcare and technology, when he co-founded Quit Genius. He explains how in just 18 months the pandemic accelerated the adoption of digital health by 10 years, and there’s no going back. “The Internet enables people to unlock improvements to their lives, and digital healthcare went from being convenient to a necessity”.
We dig into the benefits of digital healthcare, but also the scrutiny that is needed in technology, now that it is more powerful than ever and cemented in people’s lives. Yusuf also gives examples of how his digital clinic is helping people in treating tobacco, vaping, alcohol, and opioid addictions.
Yusuf has co-authored 12 peer-reviewed studies on behavioural health and substance addictions. He was featured on the Forbes 30 Under 30 List of 2018 and in Fast Company’s 100 Most Creative People in Business.
David Shrier: From sharing economy to blockchain
American futurist and Professor of Practice, AI & Innovation with Imperial College Business School in London
David sums up how the pandemic has affected people’s relationship with technology: “Everyone is tired of Zoom calls, but the convenience opened people’s minds”.
We also talk about the digital divide, about human-centered ways of working with AI, and we also address the potential in VR and AR and how nobody saw the sharing economy coming 20 years ago and, now, “it’s incredible to see how people embraced blockchain and the digitalization of financial services”.
Dame Til Wykes: The mental health discussion went viral
Professor of Clinical Psychology and Rehabilitation at King’s College London, Director of the NIHR Clinical Research Network: Mental Health
As someone with experience in the psychology field for more than 50 years, Dame Til Wykes still had to learn new ways of engaging with patients throughout the pandemic — and even learn which buttons to push on a computer to make Zoom calls. COVID-19 and the hardships of the pandemic made people more aware and ready to talk about their mental health issues, like anxiety or depression. But the pandemic wasn’t the same for everyone and Dame Til Wykes is worried about some of the effects, “most of them remain to be seen”.
Remote consultations were a big help, but she reminds us that in her field it is important to see the whole person and not just the face — for example, “if someone is tapping a foot nervously while giving us a smile, that tells us something that we cannot see in a Zoom call”. She also mentions the adoption of meditation apps bringing a form of help to some was another positive trend in this difficult period, as well as the reset button the pandemic brought to some people’s lives.
Historically, building video applications has been very difficult. There’s a lot of complicated tech behind recording, encoding, and playing videos. Luckily, Cloudflare Stream abstracts all the difficult parts away, so you can build custom video and streaming applications easily. Let’s look at how we can combine Cloudflare Stream, Access, Pages, and Workers to create a high-performance video application with very little code.
Today, we’re going to build a video application inspired by Cloudflare TV. We’ll have user authentication and the ability for administrators to upload recorded videos or livestream new content. Think about being able to build your own YouTube or Twitch using Cloudflare services!
Fetching a list of videos
On the main page of our application, we want to display a list of all videos. The videos are uploaded and stored with Cloudflare Stream, but more on that later! This code could be changed to display only the “trending” videos or a selection of videos chosen for each user. For now, we’ll use the search API and pass in an empty string to return all.
We’ll go through each video, filter out any private videos, and pull out the metadata we need, such as the thumbnail URL, ID, and created date.
Playing the videos
To allow users to play videos from your application, they need to be public, or you’ll have to sign each request. Marking your videos as public makes this process easier. However, there are many reasons you might want to control access to your videos. If you want users to log in before they play them or the ability to limit access in any way, mark them as private and use signed URLs to control access. You can find more information about securing your videos here.
If you are testing your application locally or expect to have fewer than 10,000 requests per day, you can call the /token endpoint to generate a signed token. If you expect more than 10,000 requests per day, sign your own tokens as we do here using JSON Web Tokens.
Allowing users to upload videos
The next step is to build out an admin page where users can upload their videos. You can find documentation on allowing user uploads here.
This process is made easy with the Cloudflare Stream API. You use your API token and account ID to generate a unique, one-time upload URL. Just make sure your token has the Stream:Edit permission. We hook into all POST requests from our application and return the generated upload URL.
export const cfTeamsAccessAuthMiddleware = async ({request, data, env, next}) => {
try {
const userEmail = request.headers.get("cf-access-authenticated-user-email")
if (!userEmail) {
throw new Error("User not found, make sure application is behind Cloudflare Access")
}
// Pass user info to next handlers
data.user = {
email: userEmail
}
return next()
} catch (e) {
return new Response(e.toString(), {status: 401})
}
}
export const onRequest = [
cfTeamsAccessAuthMiddleware
]
The admin page contains a form allowing users to drag and drop or upload videos from their computers. When a logged-in user hits submit on the upload form, the application generates a unique URL and then posts the FormData to it. This code would work well for building a video sharing site or with any application that allows user-generated content.
You can add a livestreaming section to your application as well, using Stream Live in conjunction with the techniques we’ve already covered. You could allow logged-in users to start a broadcast and then allow other logged-in users, or even the public, to watch it in real-time! The streams will automatically save to your account, so they can be viewed immediately after the broadcast finishes in the main section of your application.
Securing our app with middleware
We put all authenticated pages behind this middleware function. It checks the request headers to make sure the user is sending a valid authenticated user email.
export const cfTeamsAccessAuthMiddleware = async ({request, data, env, next}) => {
try {
const userEmail = request.headers.get("cf-access-authenticated-user-email")
if (!userEmail) {
throw new Error("User not found, make sure application is behind Cloudflare Access")
}
// Pass user info to next handlers
data.user = {
email: userEmail
}
return next()
} catch (e) {
return new Response(e.toString(), {status: 401})
}
}
export const onRequest = [
cfTeamsAccessAuthMiddleware
]
Putting it all together with Pages
We have Cloudflare Access controlling our log-in flow. We use the Stream APIs to manage uploading, displaying, and watching videos. We use Workers for managing fetch requests and handling API calls. Now it’s time to tie it all together using Cloudflare Pages!
Pages provides an easy way to deploy and host static websites. But now, Pages seamlessly integrates with the Workers platform (link to announcement post). With this new integration, we can deploy this entire application with a single, readable repository.
Controlling access
Some applications are better public; others contain sensitive data and should be restricted to specific users. The main page is public for this application, and we’ve used Cloudflare Access to limit the admin page to employees. You could just as easily use Access to protect the entire application if you’re building an internal learning service or even if you want to beta launch a new site!
When a user clicks the admin link on our demo site, they will be prompted for an email address. If they enter a valid Cloudflare email, the application will send them an access code. Otherwise, they won’t be able to access that page.
Check out the source code and get started building your own video application today!
For every successful technology, there is a moment where its time comes. Something happens, usually external, to catalyze it — shifting it from being a good idea with promise, to a reality that we can’t imagine living without. Perhaps the best recent example was what happened to the cloud as a result of the introduction of the iPhone in 2007. Smartphones created a huge addressable market for small developers; and even big developers found their customer base could explode in a way that they couldn’t handle without access to public cloud infrastructure. Both wanted to be able to focus on building amazing applications, without having to worry about what lay underneath.
Last year, during the outbreak of COVID-19, a similar moment happened to real time communication. Being able to communicate is the lifeblood of any organization. Before 2020, much of it happened in meeting rooms in offices all around the world. But in March last year — that changed dramatically. Those meeting rooms suddenly were emptied. Fast-forward 18 months, and that massive shift in how we work has persisted.
While, undoubtedly, many organizations would not have been able to get by without the likes of Slack, Zoom and Teams as real time collaboration tools, we think today’s iteration of communication tools is just the tip of the iceberg. Looking around, it’s hard to escape the feeling there is going to be an explosion in innovation that is about to take place to enable organizations to communicate in a remote, or at least hybrid, world.
With this in mind, today we’re excited to be introducing Cloudflare’s Real Time Communications platform. This is a new suite of products designed to help you build the next generation of real-time, interactive applications. Whether it’s one-to-one video calling, group audio or video-conferencing, the demand for real-time communications only continues to grow.
Running a reliable and scalable real-time communications platform requires building out a large-scale network. You need to get your network edge within milliseconds of your users in multiple geographies to make sure everyone can always connect with low latency, low packet loss and low jitter. A backbone to route around Internet traffic jams. Infrastructure that can efficiently scale to serve thousands of participants at once. And then you need to deploy media servers, write business logic, manage multiple client platforms, and keep it all running smoothly. We think we can help with this.
Launching today, you will be able to leverage Cloudflare’s global edge network to improve connectivity for any existing WebRTC-based video and audio application, with what we’re calling “WebRTC Components”. This includes scaling to (tens of) thousands of participants, leveraging our DDoS mitigation to protect your services from attacks, and enforce IP and ASN-based access policies in just a few clicks.
How Real Time is “Real Time”?
Real-time typically refers to communication that happens in under 500ms: that is, as fast as packets can traverse the fibre optic networks that connect the world together. In 2021, most real-time audio and video applications use WebRTC, a set of open standards and browser APIs that define how to connect, secure, and transfer both media and data over UDP. It was designed to bring better, more flexible bi-directional communication when compared to the primary browser-based communication protocol we rely on today, HTTP. And because WebRTC is supported in the browser, it means that users don’t need custom clients, nor do developers need to build them: all they need is a browser.
Importantly, we’ve seen the need for reliable, real-time communication across time-zones and geographies increase dramatically, as organizations change the way they work (yes, including us).
So where is real-time important in practice?
One-to-one calls (think FaceTime). We’re used to almost instantaneous communication over traditional telephone lines, and there’s no reason for us to head backwards.
Group calling and conferencing (Zoom or Google Meet), where even just a few seconds of delay results in everyone talking over each other.
Social video, gaming and sports. You don’t want to be 10 seconds behind the action or miss that key moment in a game because the stream dropped a few frames or decided to buffer.
Interactive applications: from 3D modeling in the browser, Augmented Reality on your phone, and even game streaming need to be in real-time.
We believe that we’ve only collectively scratched the surface when it comes to real-time applications — and part of that is because scaling real-time applications to even thousands of users requires new infrastructure paradigms and demands more from the network than traditional HTTP-based communication.
Enter: WebRTC Components
Today, we’re launching our closed beta WebRTC Components, allowing teams running centralized WebRTC TURN servers to offload it to Cloudflare’s distributed, global network and improve reliability, scale to more users, and spend less time managing infrastructure.
TURN, or Traversal Using Relays Around NAT (Network Address Translation), was designed to navigate the practical shortcomings of WebRTC’s peer-to-peer origins. WebRTC was (and is!) a peer-to-peer technology, but in practice, establishing reliable peer-to-peer connections remains hard due to Carrier-Grade NAT, corporate NATs and firewalls. Further, each peer is limited by its own network connectivity — in a traditional peer-to-peer mesh, participants can quickly find their network connections saturated because they have to receive data from every other peer. In a mixed environment with different devices (mobile, desktops), networks (high-latency 3G through to fast fiber), scaling to more than a handful of peers becomes extremely challenging.
Running a TURN service at the edge instead of your own infrastructure gets you a better connection. Cloudflare operates an anycast network spanning 250+ cities, meaning we’re very close to wherever your users are. This means that when users connect to Cloudflare’s TURN service, they get a really good connection to the Cloudflare network. Once it’s on there, we leverage our network and private backbone to get you superior connectivity, all the way back to the other user on the call.
But even better: stop worrying about scale. WebRTC infrastructure is notoriously difficult to scale: you need to make sure you have the right capacity in the right location. Cloudflare’s TURN service scales automatically and if you want more endpoints they’re just an API call away.
Of course WebRTC Components is built on the Cloudflare network, benefiting from the DDoS protection that it’s 100 Tbps network offers. From now on deploying scalable, secure, production-grade WebRTC relays globally is only a couple of API calls away.
A Developer First Real-Time Platform
But, as we like to say at Cloudflare: we’re just getting started. Managed, scalable TURN infrastructure is a critical building block to building real-time services for one-to-one and small group calling, especially for teams who have been managing their own infrastructure, but things become rapidly more complex when you start adding more participants.
Whether that’s managing the quality of the streams (“tracks”, in WebRTC parlance) each client is sending and receiving to keep call quality up, permissions systems to determine who can speak or broadcast in large-scale events, and/or building signalling infrastructure with support chat and interactivity on top of the media experience, one thing is clear: it there’s a lot to bite off.
With that in mind, here’s a sneak peek at where we’re headed:
Developer-first APIs that abstract the need to manage and configure low-level infrastructure, authentication, authorization and participant permissions. Think in terms of your participants, rooms and channels, without having to learn the intricacies of ICE, peer connections and media tracks.
Integration with Cloudflare for Teams to support organizational access policies: great for when your company town hall meetings are now conducted remotely.
Making it easy to connect any input and output source, including broadcasting to traditional HTTP streaming clients and recording for on-demand playback with Stream Live, and ingesting from RTMP sources with Stream Connect, or future protocols such as WHIP.
Embedded serverless capabilities via Cloudflare Workers, from triggering Workers on participant events (e.g. join, leave) through to building stateful chat and collaboration tools with Durable Objects and WebSockets.
… and this is just the beginning.
We’re also looking for ambitious engineers who want to play a role in building our RTC platform. If you’re an engineer interested in building the next generation of real-time, interactive applications, joinus!
If you’re interested in working with us to help connect more of the world together, and are struggling with scaling your existing 1-to-1 real-time video & audio platform beyond a few hundred or thousand concurrent users, sign up for the closed beta of WebRTC Components. We’re especially interested in partnering with teams at the beginning of their real-time journeys and who are keen to iterate closely with us.
We’re excited to introduce the open beta of Stream Live, an end-to-end scalable live-streaming platform that allows you to focus on growing your live video apps, not your codebase.
With Stream Live, you can painlessly grow your streaming app to scale to millions of concurrent broadcasters and millions of concurrent users. Start sending live video from mobile or desktop using the industry standard RTMPS protocol to millions of viewers instantly. Stream Live works with the most popular live video broadcasting software you already use, including ffmpeg, OBS or Zoom. Your broadcasts are automatically recorded, optimized and delivered using the Stream player.
When you are building your live infrastructure from scratch, you have to answer a few critical questions:
“Which codec(s) are we going to use to encode the videos?”
“Which protocols are we going to use to ingest and deliver videos?”
“How are the different components going to impact latency?”
We built Stream Live, so you don’t have to think about these questions and spend considerable engineering effort answering them. Stream Live abstracts these pesky yet important implementation details by automatically choosing the most compatible codec and streaming protocol for the client device. There is no limit to the number of live broadcasts you can start and viewers you can have on Stream Live. Whether you want to make the next viral video sharing app or securely broadcast all-hands meetings to your company, Stream will scale with you without having to spend months building and maintaining video infrastructure.
Built-in Player and Access Control
Every live video gets an embed code that can be placed inside your app, enabling your users to watch the live stream. You can also use your own player with included support for the two major HTTP streaming formats — HLS and DASH — for a granular control over the user experience.
You can limit who can view your live videos with self-expiring tokenized links for each viewer. When generating the tokenized links, you can define constraints including time-based expiration, geo-fencing and IP restrictions. When building an online learning site or a video sharing app, you can put videos behind authentication, so only logged-in users can view your videos. Or if you are building a live concert platform, you may have agreements to only allow viewers from specific countries or regions. Stream’s signed tokens help you comply with complex and custom rulesets.
Instant Recordings
With Stream Live, you don’t have to wait for a recording to be available after the live broadcast ends. Live videos automatically get converted to recordings in less than a second. Viewers get access to the recording instantly, allowing them to catch up on what they missed.
Instant Scale
Whether your platform has one active broadcaster or ten thousand, Stream Live scales with your use case. You don’t have to worry about adding new compute instances, setting up availability zones or negotiating additional software licenses.
Legacy live video pipelines built in-house typically ingest and encode the live stream continents away in a single location. Video that is ingested far away makes video streaming unreliable, especially for global audiences. All Cloudflare locations run the necessary software to ingest live video in and deliver video out. Once your video broadcast is in the Cloudflare network, Stream Live uses the Cloudflare backbone and Argo to transmit your live video with increased reliability.
Broadcast with 15 second latency
Depending on your video encoder settings, the time between you broadcasting and the video displaying on your viewer’s screens can be as low as fifteen seconds with Stream Live. Low latency allows you to build interactive features such as chat and Q&A into your application. This latency is good for broadcasting meetings, sports, concerts, and worship, but we know it doesn’t cover all uses for live video.
We’re on a mission to reduce the latency Stream Live adds to near-zero. The Cloudflare network is now within 50ms for 95% of the world’s population. We believe we can significantly reduce the delay from the broadcaster to the viewer in the coming months. Finally, in the world of live-streaming, latency is only meaningful once you can assume reliability. By using the Cloudflare network spanning over 250 locations, you get unparalleled reliability that is critical for live events.
Simple and predictable pricing
Stream Live is available as a pay-as-you-go service based on the duration of videos recorded and duration of video viewed.
It costs $5 per 1,000 minutes of video storage capacity per month. Live-streamed videos are automatically recorded. There is no additional cost for ingesting the live stream.
It costs $1 per 1,000 minutes of video viewed.
There are no surprises. You never have to pay hidden costs for video ingest, compute (encoding), egress or storage found in legacy video pipelines.
You can control how much you spend with Stream using billing alerts and restrict viewing by creating signed tokens that only work for authorized viewers.
Cloudflare Stream encodes the live stream in multiple quality levels at no additional cost. This ensures smooth playback for your viewers with varying Internet speed. As your viewers move from Wi-Fi to mobile networks, videos continue playing without interruption. Other platforms that offer live-streaming infrastructure tend to add extra fees for adding quality levels that caters to a global audience.
If your use case consists of thousands of concurrent broadcasters or millions of concurrent viewers, reach out to us for volume pricing.
Go live with Stream
Stream works independent of any domain on Cloudflare. If you already have a Cloudflare account with a Stream subscription, you can begin using Stream Live by clicking on the “Live Input” tab on the Stream Dashboard and creating a new input:
In June 2020, Cloudflare TV made its debut: a 24/7 streaming video channel, focused on topics related to building a better Internet (and the people working toward that goal). Today, over 1,000 live shows later, we’re excited to announce that we’re making the technology we used to build Cloudflare TV available to any other business that wants to run their own 24×7 streaming network. But, before we get to that, it’s worth reflecting on what it’s been like for us to run one ourselves.
Let’s take it from the top.
Cloudflare TV began as an experiment in every way you could think of, one we hoped would help capture the serendipity of in-person events in a world where those were few and far between. It didn’t take long before we realized we had something special on our hands. Not only was the Cloudflare team thriving on-screen, showcasing an amazing array of talent and expertise — they were having a great time doing it. Cloudflare TV became a virtual watercooler, spiked with the adrenaline rush of live TV.
One of the amazing things about Cloudflare TV has been the breadth of content it’s inspired. Since launching, CFTV has hosted over 1,000 live sessions, featuring everything from marquee customer events with VIP speakers to game shows and DJ sets. Cloudflare’s employee resource groups have hosted hundreds of sessions speaking to their unique experiences, sharing a wealth of advice with the next generation of technology leaders. All told, we’ve welcomed over 650 Cloudflare employees and interns — and over 500 external guests, including the likes of Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, Gradient Ventures board partner Bonita Stewart, Broadcom CTO Andy Nallappan, and Zendesk SVP Christina Liu.
Tune In, Geek Out: A CFTV Montage
This is Cloudflare TV, so of course we put an emphasis on technical content for viewers of all stripes. When we announce a new product or protocol on the Cloudflare Blog, we often host live sessions on CFTV the same day, featuring the engineers who wrote the code that just shipped. Every week, we broadcast episodes on cryptography, on learning how to code, and on the hardware that powers Cloudflare’s network in over 250 cities around the world.
Whether you’re new to Cloudflare TV or a longtime viewer, we encourage you to pay a visit to the just-launched Discover page, where you’ll find many of our most-loved shows on demand, ranging from Latest from Product and Engineering, to perennial favorite Silicon Valley Squares, to Yes We Can, featuring women leaders from across the tech industry. You can also browse upcoming Live segments and easily add them to your calendar.
One of the most promising indicators that we’re on the right track has been the feedback we’ve gotten, not just from viewers — but from companies eager to know which platform we were using to power CFTV. To date we haven’t had much to offer them other than our sincere thanks, but as of today we’re able to share something much more exciting.
But first: a look behind the scenes.
The Production Stack
We didn’t initially set out to build Cloudflare TV from scratch. But as we explored our available options, we quickly realized that few solutions were designed for 24/7 linear streaming, and fewer still were optimized to be managed by a globally-distributed team. Thankfully, at Cloudflare, we like to build.
Our engineers worked at a blazing pace to build our own homegrown system, tapping open-source projects where we could, and inventing the things that didn’t yet exist. Among the starring components:
Brave (BBC)— Brave is an open-source project named for a highly descriptive acronym: Basic Real-Time Audio Video Editor. It serves as the Cloudflare TV switchboard, allowing us to jump from live content to commercial to a pre-recorded session and back automatically, based on our broadcast schedule. The only issue with Brave is that, as the BBC put it: it’s a prototype. One that hasn’t been updated since 2018…
The CFTV Switchboard (Now streaming: Latest from Product & Engineering)
Zoom — When we first designed Cloudflare TV, there was one directive that stood above the others: it had to be easy. If presenters had to deal with installing a browser plugin or unfamiliar app, we knew we’d lose many of them — especially external guests. Zoom emerged as the clear answer, and thanks to its RTMP broadcast feature, it’s worked seamlessly to facilitate live content on Cloudflare TV. In most cases, participating in a CFTV session is as simple as joining a Zoom meeting.
Cloudflare Workers — Put simply, Cloudflare TV wouldn’t exist were it not for Cloudflare Workers. Workers is the glue that brings together each of the disparate components of the platform — handling authentication, application logic, securely relaying data from our backend to our frontend, and sprinkling SEO optimizations across the site. It’s the first tool we reach for, and often the only one we need.
Cloudflare Stream — With over 1,000 episodes in our content library, we have a lot of assets to manage. Thankfully Stream makes it easy: episodes are uploaded and automatically transcoded to the appropriate bitrate, and we use Stream embeds to power Video on Demand across the entire platform. We also use the Stream API to deliver recordings to our backend switchboard so that they can be seamlessly rebroadcast alongside our Live sessions.
Cloudflare for Teams— Cloudflare TV is obviously public-facing, but there are an array of dashboards and admin interfaces that are only accessible to select members of the Cloudflare team. Thankfully the Cloudflare for Teams suite, including Cloudflare Access, makes it easy for us to set up custom rulesets that keep everything secure, without any cumbersome VPNs or authentication hurdles.
We Get By With a Little Help from Our Engs
We knew from the beginning that it wasn’t enough for Cloudflare TV to be easy for presenters — we needed to be able to run it with a relatively small team, working remotely, most of whom were juggling other responsibilities.
A special shoutout goes to the members of Cloudflare’s office and executive admin teams, whose roles were dramatically impacted by the pandemic. Each of them has stepped up and taken on the mantle of Cloudflare TV Producer, providing technical support, calming nerves, and facilitating each one of our live sessions. We couldn’t do it without them, nor would we want to.
Even so, running a TV station is a lot of work, and we had little choice but to make the platform as efficient as possible — automating away our pain points, and developing intuitive admin tools to empower our team. Here are some of the key contributors to the system’s efficiency:
The Auto-Switcher — CFTV’s schedule features hundreds of sessions every week, including weekends, which would be prohibitive if any manual switching were involved. Thankfully the system operates essentially on auto-pilot. This is no simple playlist: every minute, a program running on Cloudflare Workers syncs with the CFTV backend to queue up recordings and inputs for upcoming sessions, deleting those belonging to sessions that have already aired. If we take a week off over the holidays, Cloudflare TV will keep on humming.
The Auto-Scheduler — Scheduling CFTV content by hand (well over 250 segments per week) quickly went from a meaningful exercise to a perverse task. By week two we knew we had to figure something else out. And so the auto-scheduler was born, allowing us to select an arbitrary window of time and populate it with recordings from our content library, filling in any time slots between live segments.
Segments can be dragged, dropped, added, and removed in a couple of clicks; one person can schedule the entire week in less than an hour. The auto-scheduler intelligently rotates through each episode in the catalog to ensure they all get airtime — and we see plenty of opportunities for it to get smarter.
The Broadcasting Center — The lifeblood of Cloudflare TV is our live segments, so we naturally spend a lot of time trying to improve the experience for presenters. The Broadcasting Center is their home base: a page that loads automatically for each session’s host, providing them a countdown timer and other essentials. And because viewer engagement is a crucial part of what makes live programming special, it features a section for viewer questions — including a call-in feature, which records and automatically transcribes questions phoned in by viewers.
Broadcasting Center — Presenter View
Meanwhile, our CFTV Producers use an administrative view of the same tool, where they check to make sure the stream is coming through clearly before each session begins. A set of admin controls allow them to troubleshoot if needed, and they can moderate viewer questions as well.
For both producers and presenters, the Broadcasting Center provides a single control plane to manage a live session. This ease-of-use goes a long way toward keeping the system running smoothly with a lean team.
Broadcasting Center — Admin View
There’s a sequel? There’s a sequel.
One reason we’ve invested in Cloudflare TV is that it serves as fantastic platform for dogfooding — not only are we leveraging a broad array of Cloudflare’s media products, but our 24/7 linear content makes us a particularly demanding customer, with no appetite for arbitrary constraints like time limits or maintenance downtime.
With that in mind, we’re excited to integrate many of the new technologies Cloudflare is introducing this week, which will combine to power an overhauled version of the CFTV platform that we’re calling Cloudflare TV 2.0. Namely:
Real Time Communications Platform — Today, Cloudflare announced its new Real Time Communications Platform, powered by WebRTC. In the near future, Cloudflare TV will leverage this platform to handle many of our live sessions. CFTV will continue to support Zoom, OBS, and any other application capable of outputting a RTMP stream, because convenience is one of the essential pillars in helping our presenters engage with the platform. But we see opportunities to push our creativity to new heights with custom, programmatically-controlled media streams — powered by Cloudflare’s Real-Time Communications Platform.
Stream Live— CFTV’s backend server currently handles video encoding for our live broadcast, generating a stream that is relayed to a video.js embed. Replacing this setup with Stream Live will yield several key benefits: first, we will offload video encoding to Cloudflare’s global network, resulting in improved speed, reliability, and redundancy. It also means we’ll be able to generate multiple renditions of the broadcast at different bitrates, allowing us to offer streams that are optimized for mobile devices with limited bandwidth, and to dynamically switch between bitrates as a user’s network conditions change.
Stream Connect— Today, the only way to watch Cloudflare TV is from the platform’s homepage — but there’s no reason we can’t syndicate it to other popular video platforms like YouTube. Stream Connect will become the primary endpoint for our backend mixer, and will in turn generate multiple copies of that stream, outputting to YouTube, the main broadcast, and any number of additional platforms.
We’re also actively working on a fresh implementation of our switchboard — one that is designed to be more reliable, scalable, and customizable. This switchboard will power the core of Cloudflare TV 2.0.
It’s not TV. It’s Cloudflare TV.
Cloudflare TV 2.0 will represent a major step forward for the platform, one that leverages over a year of insights as we rearchitect the system from its core to take full advantage of the Cloudflare network. And we’re doing it with you in mind: the same technology will be used to power Cloudflare TV as a Service.
Most products at Cloudflare are designed to scale from individuals up to the largest businesses. This is not one of those. Running a 24×7 streaming network takes a lot of time and effort. While we’ve made it easier than ever before, this is a product really designed for businesses that are willing to make a commitment similar to what we have at Cloudflare. But, if you are, we’re here to tell you that running a streaming service is incredibly rewarding, and we want to enable more companies to do it.
Interested? Fill out this form and, if it looks like you’d be a good fit, we’ll reach out and work with you to help build your own streaming service.
Early in the life of most startups, there is a time of incredible hustle, creative problem solving, and making the impossible possible through out-of-the-box thinking and elbow grease. Grizzled veterans, who have lived through those days of running on coffee and shoestring budgets, look back on that time and fascinate the newcomers with war stories of back in the day, of adventures and first wins, when they kept the lights on by sheer force of will.
To help early stage startups get going, Cloudflare is giving away one year of the Startup Enterprise plan to all early stage startups in participating accelerator programs. That early stage time is special for product development, and entrepreneurs unlock worlds of possibilities when they have advanced tools on their hands, such as the power of the Cloudflare network.
What’s included in the Startup Enterprise plan?
In addition to the core offerings in the Pro and Business plans (e.g., CDN, DNS, WAF, custom SSL cert, 50 page rules), when founders sign up for the Startup Enterprise plan they’ll get special access to:
An affordable, scalable, on-demand video platform with simple, comprehensive APIs.
Additionally, when there are new Cloudflare products that are still in early access, participants on the Startup Enterprise plan can tell us about their use case for the product managers’ consideration for early access.
What startups are eligible for the Startup Enterprise plan?
To be eligible for the Startup Enterprise plan, a startup must be currently enrolled in a participating accelerator program or be a recent graduate. Additional eligibility criteria will be listed on the vendor perk info page of the accelerator program.
Get started
If you are a founder in a participating accelerator program, find the Cloudflare perk from your program’s vendor perk page and follow the instructions there.
If you are a founder in a program that is not yet a partner, drop us a line at [email protected], or ask the folks who run the vendor perk program at your accelerator program to drop us a line at [email protected].If you run or work for an accelerator program, or are friends with folks who do, do drop us a line at [email protected]. We’d love to make our tools available to your portfolio companies.
When our co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince introduced Cloudflare TV to the world last year, he described it as a platform for experimentation. By empowering Cloudflare employees to try whatever they could think up on air — bound only by restraints of common sense — we hoped to unlock aspects of our team’s talent and creativity that otherwise might go untapped in the midst of the pandemic.
The results, as they say, have been extraordinary.
We’ve seen a wealth of content that can only be described as inspirational — like Vets at Cloudflare exploring the journeys of military veterans, This is What a Technologist Looks Like showcasing diversity across the industry, and Yes We Can, Cloudflare co-founder, President & COO Michelle Zatlyn’s series debunking the myth that there are no women in tech. Founder Focus has shared the stories of dozens of entrepreneurs, Between Two Clouds delves into the world of customer support, and series like Home Office TV and Cooking With Cloudflare have given an inside look at the personalities (and recipes) that make the Cloudflare community so unique.
All told, Cloudflare TV has featured well over one thousand presenters and their illustrious guests. We’ve been fortunate to welcome the likes of Eric Yuan, founder and CEO of Zoom; Cindy Cohn, Executive Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation; John Collison, co-founder and President of Stripe; and Jackie Smalls, Chief Programs Officer at Code.org, to name a few.
We’ve also seen amazing contributions from Cloudflare’s Employee Resource Groups — including Latinflare celebrating Cinco De Mayo, Womenflare celebrating Women’s Empowerment Month, Asianflare and Desiflare celebrating APAC Heritage Month, Afroflare celebrating Black History Month (UK & US), Mindflare (supporting mental health awareness), Cloudflare’s sustainability group, Greencloud, and Proudflare, Cloudflare’s LGBTQIA+ group, which is celebrating Pride all month long.
The feedback from fans has been extraordinary. We regularly receive messages from viewers telling us how much they were inspired by a recent guest, or sharing that they leave Cloudflare TV “playing in the background all day.” You can tell they care, because they also let us know that they don’t appreciate when the commercials are louder than the program itself (we’re working on that!)
Perhaps the most meaningful impact of Cloudflare TV has been the way it’s connected the Cloudflare team. Cloudflare is growing quickly, and many team members have never set foot in a Cloudflare office. For anyone who is new to the company, Cloudflare TV has served as a way to get to know their colleagues, and vice versa. Job candidates use it to learn about the teams they aspire to work on. And we all get an excuse to talk to folks beyond the borders of our usual Zoom calls. It is, in a sense, the ultimate virtual water cooler — and the water is spiked with the adrenaline rush of live TV. It’s a potent mix that often leads to declarations of, “that was fun!”
It sure is.
Lights, Camera, Gallery View, Action
Supporting such a broad array of on-air talent is no small feat, and we have an amazing production team that helps ensure every session goes smoothly (give or take). Many of our Cloudflare TV Producers have roles at Cloudflare that were radically impacted by the pandemic, including our office management and executive admin teams. Few of them had prior TV experience. But that hasn’t kept them from becoming absolutely indispensable.
Before each and every live session — all 1,000+ of them — Cloudflare TV’s producers join our hosts to make sure they have everything they need. They provide crucial technical support, soothe pre-show jitters, and deal with the myriad tiny (and not-so-tiny) emergencies that make live TV so exciting. They are television producers in every sense of the word, and they have helped make this newfangled platform a very human experience, at a time when such things matter.
Also, our engineers are pretty great too. Speaking of which…
Next Season on Cloudflare TV…
Cloudflare TV began as an experiment, and that label still applies. We’re finding creative ways to navigate our own pain points, dogfooding Cloudflare’s newest technologies, and generally trying to take advantage of the fact that this is not well-charted territory. We’ll soon share more technical details on how we run a TV station 24/7, and some of the tools we’re building along the way. Here’s an appetizer.
Our product roadmap includes many of the things you’d expect, like an easier way to find your favorite episodes, and to hear about upcoming new ones. The rainbow bars adorning this blog post will make fewer cameos on the broadcast itself. And just like any good experiment: there will be surprises.
So tune in, geek out — and don’t touch that dial.
The collective thoughts of the interwebz
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