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Cloudflare Stream – Combines video encoding, global delivery, and player
- _eht 9y agoI typically find myself off set with every new Cloudflare offering, followed by wondering if they are reaching for a niche outside of DDOS protection. I'm not in a position to explore a need for Cloudflare outside of hiding my origin IP addresses, but for those of you who are, are you actually using and benefiting from the wide array of offerings from Cloudflare? As it stands now, I see these announcements and make a mental note to expect a slough of marketing emails in my inbox for the next couple weeks.
- manigandham 9y agoYes, they have plenty of customers benefiting and are one of the few companies that are constantly innovating with new features, especially with content delivery performance and security. As much as I dislike network consolidation into a handful of companies, there are not many real competitors for the features and value of Cloudflare.
- snaky 9y agoSpeaking about consolidation, sometimes it looks like AOLv2 (or MSNv2) is coming, with Cloudflare on transport layer, Google on WWW layer on top of it, and Facebook on social layer on top of it.
- _eht 9y agoI thought I made it clear that I realized that when I asked for other people's opinions.
- _eht 9y agoNice edit. Were the downvotes getting to you?
- manigandham 9y agoNope.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- eugeneionesco 9y agoI basically use Cloudflare for dns management, they make it so easy....
- thinkMOAR 9y agoI use a ton of registrars, almost all have equal simple dns management as CF. Which requires a party less to use or leak traffic information to.
- _eht 9y agoWhat is the turnaround time for DNS to propogate on all of those registrars? Are you forced into waiting for TTL's to expire? I may be wrong but I think eugeneionesco is referencing instant DNS changes which come as a benefit of using Cloudflare and other large DNS management companies. I've never personally seen a registrar offer anything like that.
- eugeneionesco 9y agoAlmost instant DNS change is something that I kinda take for granted. Surprising that's so rare...
- mugsie 9y agowell ... the protocol was designed not do that. DNS is "just" a globally distributed, eventually consistent, key:value store, with a ton of caching built into it. Also, while it may look instant to you, it may not be to your customers / users / other internet people.
- always_good 9y agoIt's instant because CloudFlare isn't changing DNS records, just where its pointers point to. Look at it / try it.
- 9y ago
- OliverJones 9y agoI believe DDOS-repelling service is an intended consequence of their global CDN, not its purpose. Its purpose is speeding things up for users.
- nilved 9y agoWe need to stop Cloudflare.
- benbristow 9y agoWhy?
- nilved 9y agoThey are monopolizing and centralizing the Web to the detriment of everyone. You don't need to believe me, though: the free and open Web is on a march toward death, Cloudflare is one of the nails in its coffin, and I will be happy enough to say "I told you so" once the grave is filled.
- jermaustin1 9y agoWhat can we do to stop it?
- rightos 9y agoLook at how entrenched the big video players are. If anything this is creating more competition. And better - if a service that started by using this got large enough, they could spin out on their own with no ties to the original platform.
- always_good 9y agoThe decentralized web is broken. You can kick almost any website off the internet after sending $2 to a booter. This leads to centralization. Though of course CloudFlare protects booters as well, but I'm willing to buy their philosophical argument.
- bhtru 9y agoDo we need to stop Akamai, AWS CouldFront, MaxCDN, Rackspace, et al, too?
- snaky 9y agoWhy don't you just create competition for them?
- occultist_throw 9y agoAgain.. More services that us Tor users are exempt from, lest we go into captcha hell. Edit: Seriously, -1's and an accusation of supporting pedophilia? I've certainly hit on a raw topic. And frankly, I'm not wrong regarding Captcha hell. We've had dozens of articles and threads about that very topic.
- bunny554 9y agoWhy should Cloudflare pander to pedophiles?
- jerheinze 9y agoAs a Tor user, there was a time when Cloudflare's captchas reduced drastically. And as long as you're using the Tor Browser, there's a great chance that you'll rarely see Cloudflare's captchas.
- jgrahamc 9y agoThis is correct. We radically altered how we handle Tor Browser months and months ago. I personally use TBB and I don't see Cloudflare CAPTCHAs.
- occultist_throw 9y agoHmm.. Then a slightly different question: Do you handle OBS4 transits differently then? I have a few places that I go that actively block Tor - OBS4 and Scramblesuit both traverse these blocks. Because of that, I primarily run those transits, and I tend to get captcha hell still. I'd be willing to debug on my end.
- jerheinze 9y agoI think you're misunderstanding things, Cloudflare has no way to know which pluggable transport (such as obfs4 and the retired scramblesuit) you use to access the Tor network. They're only interested in exit traffic. Which Tor Browser version do you have?
- adriancooney 9y agoIt's interesting that they have "monetization" in one of the panels in their process diagram. Does that mean Cloudflare is getting into the advertising game?
- ddorian43 9y agoProbably connecting with third-party like every other video platform.
- _eht 9y agoVery likely. Advertising is a proven and resilient industry.
- convery 9y agoFrom Jan 30 about advertising: https://blog.cloudflare.com/firebolt/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/firebolt/
- sbarre 9y agoI am curious if this means they will enable access controls on streams somehow. One of the challenges with video delivery and where sites like YouTube can't work is if your business relies on providing videos to paid or logged-in members only. Patreon creators get around this in a kludgy way by using unlisted YT videos (which can still be shared by rogue patrons) but that's not ideal. But if you want to control access to a stream based on some custom business logic in your application, you're currently stuck serving your own video or using one of the existing combination of encoder/server/player that their post alludes to.
- eastdakota 9y agoHere are the technical details behind Cloudflare Stream: https://blog.cloudflare.com/how-cloudflare-streams/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/how-cloudflare-streams/
- dullgiulio 9y agoAny idea when the pricing will be finalized?
- eastdakota 9y agoWe have a good sense of the pricing but want to talk with more customers during the beta period. We're sure that it will be charged on something that doesn't create a perverse incentive against innovation (like per-byte pricing). Initially the pricing will be time based (e.g., per minute viewed) and we think we may be able to create a CPM price (i.e., per view regardless of length up to some limit). Our goal is to be the lowest cost, highest quality, easiest solution in the market.
- r2dnb 9y agoJust to represent the people who like me will not be able to invest time considering your tech until pricing is available. The pricing of the infrastructure has the potential to literally poison a product.
- fizx 9y agoSame. I was excited until I saw no pricing. Representing a 7+ figure yearly budget for this.
- shimon_e 9y ago>Our goal is to be the lowest cost, highest quality, easiest solution in the market. Youtube is free. Sidenote, I am still interested in this product.
- 9y ago
- jcampbell1 9y agoI do a lot of video stuff, and I have no idea what lossless compression is. What does it mean? Does it mean not using a resolution higher than the player is presented on the screen? Does it mean setting a sensible minimum CRF in x264?
- gsich 9y ago--cq 0
- roboyoshi 9y agoLossless means that the data is compressed on a bit-level. Has nothing todo with encoding. Similar to WinRAR and ZIP, it probably uses a compression algorithm specific to cloudflare storage to serve the video faster?
- simias 9y agoYou can have lossless compressors tailor-made for specific applications who will typically achieve a better compression ratio than the "generic" compression algorithms WinRAR, ZIP and friends use. For instance try zip'ing a WAV file and compare it to the same file encoded in FLAC. Typically FLAC will achieve better compression while still being lossless. There are lossless video codecs, like VC-2 for instance. It's not very common in the consumer world however because people generally don't want to stream or store high definition video with a single digit compression factor (that single digit being generally around 2).
- simias 9y agoLossless means lossless, i.e. you have no loss of information. The decompressed video is exactly what you had when you started. It's PNG (lossless) vs. JPG (lossy) or FLAC (lossless) vs. MP3 (lossy). Of course lossless compression is typically a lot less compact than lossy alternatives (the article mentions a 1/2 compression ration, which is not much compared to lossy video codecs) but it means you're not degrading your video at all, you just have additional processing. Note that some algorithms these days claim to be "visually lossless" which is mainly a marketing gimmick which means that it's lossy but you wouldn't be able to tell the difference with the naked eye in normal conditions (TICO claims that for instance).
- spo81rty 9y agoIn the past I created a product around turning photos in to videos. This would have been insanely helpful. At that time the best we could do is support one file format and size.
- buf 9y agoDo you offer audio streaming? I run a site that has 1M+ audio samples uploaded.
- eastdakota 9y agoYes, we will.
- edent 9y agoI like this idea - but I worry about the cost. YouTube is, essentially, free. Even if I don't want to use them as a host, I can upload a video and a few minutes later download it in DASH and a variety of older formats - again, for free. If I do use them, I might get a few quid of advertising revenue. CloudFlare video lets me keep people on my site (damn those distracting cat videos) and possibly gives me a branded player. That's nice - but is the cost of use (per minute transcoding) going to be worth it?
- sbarre 9y agoIf you're not willing to pay for the video hosting and serving, you're not their target audience. YouTube was made for you.
- bubblethink 9y agoI think there is some middle ground. It costs very little to host a blog or a static website. If you want to add video to such a site, things change completely, and the main option for most people is youtube. So if you add the ability to self host video with some reasonable pricing (i.e., something without nasty surprises if your video goes viral), it could work.
- usrusr 9y agoThe blog will probably stay on embedded YouTube, where the content might even generate some long tail coin if successful. This seems to aim a little higher: If YouTube is the home tape deck of video streaming and Netflix/Amazon are the major record labels, cloudflare would provide record pressing and distribution services to indie labels. (Do millennials even understand those terms?) The ideal customer would probably be a smaller Disney competitor who wants to try their luck at selling directly but understands very well that they can't hire a team of engineers matching that at Netflix.
- brightfog 9y agoThis is so needed. A powerful Youtube alternative which can be setup by the mainstream.
- toomuchtodo 9y agoThe value in Youtube is that Google pays for it, not the mainstream.
- rocqua 9y agoThe value of Youtube is the network of content consumers and producers that use it. The danger of Youtube is it's total monopoly on video discovery. A system like this will make it easier to create Youtube competitors, so when youtube screws over a part of their producers / consumers they have somewhere viable to turn to.
- eastdakota 9y agoMaking it easier for people to create competitors to YouTube (and Netflix and Snapchat and Facebook and...) is exactly the reason we built this. Doing video at scale is far too difficult and, as video becomes more important, that difficulty is creating a barrier that keeps new entrants from getting into the market. We want to be a part of helping solve that.
- snaky 9y agoSpeaking about monopoly, there are many competing video hosting services in China. That's a quite fruitful competition among them, leading to many of them try to find the niche for itself and lean to some user category or other.
- bogomipz 9y agoYoutube was started by the mainstream. Google acquired Youtube.
- bogomipz 9y ago>"Why? Simply put: the video streaming market is screwed up. While there's a lot of money spent on video, there are only really about 1,000 customers that do any meaningful level of streaming." So the statement that "the video streaming market is screwed up" is based on the fact that Cloudflare themselves only have 1K customers doing a meaningful level of streaming? You might want to talk to Akami, Amazon, Edgecast and Fastly. I'm sure they will tell you the video streaming market is quite healthy.
- eastdakota 9y agoNo, to be clear, if you add up all the companies using all the CDNs you mention you only get to about 1,000 that are doing so at any meaningful and interesting scale. That's a shame. There should be 100x that. That's what we want to enable.
- dsacco 9y agoDo you have a citation on hand for this? I’m not familiar with the industry or incumbents and don’t know one way or the other.
- chillydawg 9y agoI think the CEO of cloudflare is a pretty decent authoritative source for such a statement.
- dsacco 9y agoOkay, but (candidly) he's also selling something, so isn't an independent citation valuable? Is it wrong to ask for more information?
- bogomipz 9y agoThe same CEO that also happens to be marketing a new product? Do you really believe that all statements made by CEOs should be accepted without question?
- OzzyB 9y agoIf I wanted to create an alternative to YouTube with a conservative bent what are the chances Cloudflare will wake up one morning and shut me down? What if the content is just generally in "bad taste" and not overtly Neo-Nazi, will CF feel the need to play "Content Cop" or are they willing to abide by their role as utility?
- eastdakota 9y agoZero.
- tomschlick 9y agoWhat about on the monetization side of things? I know many YT firearms channels that have been basically blacklisted from monetization in recent months because YT classifies anything they do as "unsuitable for ads". It has forced a lot to double publish to https://www.full30.com/ https://www.full30.com/ to monetize their work.
- eastdakota 9y agoWhile we intend to provide ways for our customers to insert advertising or partner with third party advertisers, I don't think we'll be providing an ad network ourselves anytime soon. As a result, end users will have much more control over exactly how their content is monetized. Using your example, a firearms video stream could stream videos through Cloudflare Stream and sell ads themselves or partner with an ad network that was willing to sell them to an audience that cared about firearms. I totally agree that the one-size-fits-all solution of Facebook or YouTube reverts to the lowest common denominator and, in doing so, will inherently not be right for every publisher.
- discreditable 9y agoYT has also been demonetizing videos on one of my favorite veterinary channels for being too graphic. It's a shame because they use the funds to provide care to abandoned animals. They always warn when videos contain surgery footage, even though it's relatively tame imho.
- sbarre 9y agoSo, will Cloudflare have the same kind of DMCA and/or ContentID controls that YouTube has? How will they police the content they stream for their clients/partners? I know a few online businesses that don't use YouTube because they operate in a grey area in terms of fair use on videos (videogame footage) and they don't want to build their video business on YT because of their "trust the claimant over the content producer" and 3-strikes approach to DMCA claims. Obviously if customers are paying Cloudflare to host their videos, I would assume the dispute process would be less one-sided, but have they said anything about this yet?
- eastdakota 9y agoWe will respect copyrights and our obligations under the DMCA and other laws outside the United States.
- adekok 9y agoi.e. my DMCA'd videos may no longer be accessible on Cloudflare. But people can still go directly to my site outside of Cloudflare. I just have to pay the bandwidth charges. :( On top of that, I suspect there's no "3 strikes" rule, either. A cache is a cache. Entries in the cache expire for a lot of reasons, including legal ones. Lots of cache expiration has no impact on ongoing caching of new data.
- bo1024 9y agoCan you be more specific? I'm not invested in this, but if I were, I would want to know: - will Cloudfare require a legal DMCA takedown notice in order to take down content, or will they allow 'trusted' partners such as large companies to simply assert a violation? - will Cloudfare employ any sort of automated copyright screening algorithms, like ContentID, that automatically prevent sharing of some content? - when served with a DMCA takedown, will Cloudfare immediately take down the content (presumption of guilt) or will they allow the content-provider time to respond, either to contest the takedown or take responsibility? - will Cloudfare push back against or provide consequences for filing fradulent DMCA takedowns?
- JoeCoder_ 9y ago> There's no good technical reason not to enable lossless compression Why would you want to losslessly compress audio or video? The resulting files would be huge--often too huge to steam. Lossy compression is what you want. I must be misunderstanding the article?
- dsacco 9y agoI would assume because the CDN customers make downstream promises to their own customers that the data will maintain losslessness. There are two potential reasons why that guarantee might be useful that I can think of: - your product is explicitly lossless as a feature (like Tidal for streaming lossless music) - you have to provide the files to others for reasons other than watching or listening (like editing), where integrity matters, and the use case/context requires a stream instead of just a file download
- bo1024 9y agoIf you read on for context, it sounds like they are comparing to the case where the customer simply sends some uncompressed video file, and pointing out that you might as well enable lossless compression in this case. However, CDNs (or somebody) introduce technical obstacles for this because they charge by bandwidth, so compression would hurt their profits.
- JoeCoder_ 9y ago> uncompressed video file 1920x1080 at 3 bytes per pixel and 30 frames per second is 11GB for just one minute of video, and 186MB per second. That's far too big and expensive to stream, and outside of somewhat special circumstances I've never heard of anyone storing video in such a huge format.
- bo1024 9y agoAgreed. We don't have the whole story here, I'm just trying to understand from context. Perhaps the thing that's being sent is not a raw video file, but some other file that could still be improved via lossless compression.
- tylermenezes 9y agoThis is very cool. We noticed the same thing -- it's stupidly hard and expensive to do anything cool with video -- and worked on a similar product in YC S12. https://techcrunch.com/2013/04/08/yc-backed-tapin-tv-evolves-into-framebase-to-make-building-video-products-less-painful/ https://techcrunch.com/2013/04/08/yc-backed-tapin-tv-evolves... Sadly, it didn't work out for a number of reasons, largely unrelated to the actual idea. I'm glad someone else is finally working on it.
- shomyo 9y agoIncluding censorship /s
- prebrov 9y agoCloudFlare is entering a very crowded space. With YouTube and Facebook owning an overwhelming majority of video hosting market, what’s left is shared between Brightcove, The Platform, Ooyala, Bitmovin, Vimeo, Vidyard, Wistia and a whole ton of smaller players and in-house solutions (ffmpeg -> _any cdn_ -> video.js). Surely, this piece of the pie is not as big as many had hoped for, but there’s definitely more than a 1000 companies that think their video content is worth a better platform than YouTube or Facebook, however they define “better”. What’s the deal with ‘lossless compression’? I feel like they use the term very differently from how the industry uses it. Multiple resolutions, adaptive bitrates, dynamic packaging for different versions of HLS/DASH/Smooth are pretty much a must-have for any video solution these days, free or paid. It’s amusing to hear an argument that CDNs are hampering adoption of better video compression from a CDN company. However, while Akamai surely would love to bill for more bytes per minute of video, no one is asking them. They just distribute whatever and however many bytes origin server has for them (give or take some convenience features around it). CDNs are scrambling to provide compelling features to increase stickiness, usually with limited success when it comes to video. Bandwidth-heavy customers do want to take advantage of rapidly commoditising technology and falling prices and are pushing for multi-CDN strategy. Using correct terminology and customising stock Bitdash player would have helped at the start of such ambitious endeavour. Good luck to CloudFlare and congrats to Bitmovin.
- vim_wannabe 9y agoOut of interest: why is a JS player required for video? Is it just to make more browsers compatible, the video more hackable for annotations/ads, or is there something else? Edit: And a related question: would Cloudflare Stream work without the JS player using a regular video-tag?
- toomuchtodo 9y agoBoth.
- jameslk 9y agoMore reliable & easier to use API, extendable support for other codecs/streams, customizable UI, customizable playback, plugin ecosystem, tracking
- jabo 9y agoThis link is 404ing at the moment: https://www.cloudflare.com/stream/ https://www.cloudflare.com/stream/ Linked from this page: https://www.cloudflare.com/performance/ https://www.cloudflare.com/performance/
- remyg 9y agoThanks for the heads up. Fixing now. https://www.cloudflare.com/products/cloudflare-stream/ https://www.cloudflare.com/products/cloudflare-stream/
- therealmarv 9y agoDo you restrict the content usage policy? Is it possible to use this service e.g. for adult content or e.g. political content (all legal in my country) ?
- GeneticGenesis 9y agoLooks like this is a Bitmovin resell - Player is Bitmovin and the DASH manifests are clearly created by them too. Storage appears to be Google Cloud storage with Cloudflare's CDN tacked on in front. Doesn't look like any radical innovation to me.
- orf 9y agohttps://blog.cloudflare.com/how-cloudflare-streams/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/how-cloudflare-streams/ How they deliver the video is pretty innovative: > How we accomplish this is by dynamically assigning data centers IP ranges based on which are currently being underutilized. Then videos are loaded alongside a manifest file, pointing the player to where they can locate the different chunks of the video for each bitrate. (As we described earlier, this is how adaptive streaming works: the player uses this manifest file to quickly locate different bitrate formats and switch between them as network latency changes). That manifest file is dynamically generated to point to the closest data center using Cloudflare’s default Anycast IP for the first chunk, then to the underutilized data centers for subsequent chunks. The final result is that the first segment is fast, with low cost subsequent segments. This allows us to offer a video solution that is at the best price, because let's face it, enabling video today is really expensive and unpredictable and it doesn't have to be.
- GeneticGenesis 9y agoThat's not really innovative - other CDNs are already doing the fast first few segments and then slower/cheaper CDN once the buffer is built up. Hola CDN for example. https://holacdn.com/multicdn https://holacdn.com/multicdn Dynamic Manifest generation has been done for years, first by Unified Streaming, now by most companies.
- madeofpalk 9y agoThe innovative thing about Hola is that they're using people's computers that have their VPN software installed as PoPs.
- Mithorium 9y agoWill this be able to handle live streaming, for example using OBS?
- no1youknowz 9y agoFrom the comments on the blog post. eastdakota: "We plan to support live streaming. We're gathering data on how people would prefer to do streaming. As soon as we figure out the best way to support the greatest number of use cases we'll add it to live to Stream." Definitely really interested to know what they are thinking of doing. Potentially a customer if they do it right and much cheaper than the competition!
- r1ch 9y agoThis only appears to be for VOD.
- vim_wannabe 9y agoDoes this bad boy have any chance of working when viewing from China? For what I understand content behind Cloudflare CDN doesn't work from there.
- bhhaskin 9y agoI would love to see an open source way to do this. Video streaming is kind of the last really crappy thing on the web. Sure you can upload an .mp4 and use a video element, but thats not really streaming. Cloudflare is a great service and I recommend it to clients, but personally I don't want to rely on third parties for my personal projects. I want to support and promote the open web.
- E7amar 9y agoThis is not for live streaming Wowza-like no ?
- alfg 9y agoDidn't see any mention of DRM support. Are there any plans to support DRM packaging? Playready/Widevine/Fairplay/etc.
- omarforgotpwd 9y agoz
- dmitrygr 9y ago> The next Evan Spiegel shouldn’t have to > know what a megabit per second or H.264 are. Yes, yes he should