
Cloudflare Stream – Combines video encoding, global delivery, and player - Bulk70
https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-cloudflare-stream/
======
prebrov
CloudFlare 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
Out 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?

~~~
shakkhar
> Edit: And a related question: would Cloudflare Stream work without the JS
> player using a regular video-tag?

Depends on the browser. This is the primary reason why people actually use a
JS player that wraps around video tag. The other reasons are to accommodate
business logic (i. e. overlay on top of the video, pre-roll, thumbnail, etc.)
and better UX.

~~~
vim_wannabe
The latter reason I get, but looking at video-tag compatibility on
[https://caniuse.com/#feat=video](https://caniuse.com/#feat=video) shouldn't
just offering h264 as the baseline and the higher resolution formats in
source-tags
([https://caniuse.com/#search=source](https://caniuse.com/#search=source))
cover almost any browser?

~~~
shakkhar
Yes but that is just the baseline. You want HEVC / VP9 for browsers which can
play that, you want 5.1 audio for home theaters, you want adaptive streaming
when the support is available, and so on. You don't want just the minimum for
_all_ of your clients. You want some code that tailors the experience based on
client capability. That's what the JS player handles.

~~~
vim_wannabe
Adaptive streaming sure, but can you not handle the different audio
combinations using source-tags? And HEVC/VP9 with h264 fallback I would
imagine is the primary use case they (WHATWG?) were thinking of supporting
when creating the source tag.

~~~
prebrov
Technically you could have a single URL that returns any manifest based on
user-agent or whatever player info is available in the GET request.

But yeah, JS players make life a whole lot easier by providing a single API
for customisation, handling media source extensions and a bunch of other
stuff.

------
OzzyB
If 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?

~~~
lsmarigo
I know you guys took major issue with the Cloudlfare takedown of DailyStormer
but try to look at the big picture. Mankind has never had a tool as powerful
as the internet. The advent of the printing press played a key role in the
lead up to the Salem Witch Trials. How big a role the internet played in the
mess we find ourselves in today as a country, that's up to future historians
to argue, but make no mistake the impact is massive and unlike anything we've
ever seen. The spread of hate and bigotry on the internet left unchecked has
now lead to real loss of life which is what prompted
CloudFlare/Reddit/Facebook to push these new policies. How, in the face of
actual murders can you contend that these companies are wrong to take down
these websites?

Is loss of human life an acceptable cost for free speech?

Tech companies didn't choose to be the society police, yet here we are.

~~~
powertower
> Mankind has never had a tool as powerful as the internet. The advent of the
> printing press played a key role in the lead up to the Salem Witch Trials.

Name one person harmed by the site?

If you have ever seen a page of DailyStormer, you'd either laugh or go away.

No one has ever killed anyone after reading a few paragraphs on that site.

Putting in the argument of "Is loss of human life an acceptable cost for free
speech" is not an honest way of describing censorship of content that is silly
at its worst and dumb at its best.

~~~
josteink
But clearly when a huge crowd of Antifas are overwhelming and attacking a
relative small crowd of stupid nazis, with bats, and one guy try to make it
out of there before his car is smashed to bits (with the obvious tragic
accident waiting to happen)...

Clearly it’s the nazis who are out of control and we need to take down their
websites. Freedom of speech be damned!

Seriously. This was a harmless, stupid, non-violent demo for nazis to out
themselves in, before the antifa turned up and got people killed.

Are _their_ websites being taken down? No? How come?

Disclaimer: think nazis are about as stupid as it gets.

Edit: not exactly expecting upvotes for this post, but this thread clearly
needs some balance.

These are the guys who rushed a non-violent demo. These are the people you are
defending:
[https://mobile.twitter.com/PoliticalShort/status/90191505521...](https://mobile.twitter.com/PoliticalShort/status/901915055213625344)

~~~
yahna
> Edit: not exactly expecting upvotes for this post, but this thread clearly
> needs some balance.

It doesn't. Seriously, you're making excuses for a murderous white supremacist
asshole.

------
sbarre
So, 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
We will respect copyrights and our obligations under the DMCA and other laws
outside the United States.

~~~
bo1024
Can 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?

~~~
corobo
Disclaimer: As far as I understand it. May not be completely accurate, not a
lawyer much less a lawyer in the USA.

On receiving a DMCA takedown notice they _have_ to remove access to the
content. Them's the rules of the DMCA. You can then file a counter claim if
the notice is mistaken or fraudulent or you have the required permissions. The
next step for the claimant is then to either remove their claim and allow your
content to be restored or sue you. The DMCA also requires repeat infringers be
banned from the service. In this case I imagine that means your account, not
singular website, gets banned.

If they don't do that then Cloudflare loses their safe harbor status and would
be liable for the content you upload.

While possibly controversial to say, the way YouTube handles copyright claims
is actually far easier and much safer (legally) on the end user.

You should always seriously consider the repercussions if you're going to have
a site that handles user-uploaded content. Primarily make it as easy as
possible for your service to receive the initial DMCA takedown notice rather
than force the claimant to go to Cloudflare directly.

For a similar process check out how GitHub handles DMCA claims:
[https://help.github.com/articles/dmca-takedown-
policy/](https://help.github.com/articles/dmca-takedown-policy/)

~~~
dx034
As I understand youtube allows large companies to automatically delete videos,
without sending a DMCA? They have some kind of API where they can delete
videos they think violate their rights so that Google has less administrative
costs. This has backfired in the past as many videos were deleted that didn't
actually violate any rights.

~~~
rhizome
Correct:
[https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/3045545](https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/3045545)

------
GeneticGenesis
Looks 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
[https://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
That'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
The innovative thing about Hola is that they're using people's computers that
have their VPN software installed as PoPs.

------
eastdakota
Here are the technical details behind Cloudflare Stream:
[https://blog.cloudflare.com/how-cloudflare-
streams/](https://blog.cloudflare.com/how-cloudflare-streams/)

~~~
dullgiulio
Any idea when the pricing will be finalized?

~~~
eastdakota
We 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.

~~~
shimon_e
>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.

~~~
madeofpalk
Youtube is free, but you can't white label it. NBC isn't going to build their
catch up video site on Youtube

------
bogomipz
>"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
No, 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.

~~~
KGIII
Why should there be 100x more? Video is not optimal for lots of information.
It's not interactive or easy to cite and reference. It is bandwidth intense
and typically has a lower information density per byte than text has.

There are plenty of places for video, but I am not so sure we need more of it.
I'd say the tendency to put more content into video format is an overall
negative trend.

~~~
chii
Whether some info is in video format is irrelevant.

The fact is, the only platform for video, right now, which can work is
youtube. If you host your own video instead, it both has a high cost, and low
rate of returns.

If cloudflare can make hosting your own video more cost effective, it is a
plus for the internet. I don't want youtube to be so dominant that they can
start doing things like censoring and curating.

~~~
KGIII
My comment was about them asserting there should be 100x the video content.
Why should there be? It's a pretty horrible way to share information, in all
but a few situations.

~~~
always_good
CloudFlare isn't saying there should be 100x more videos.

They're saying that they can make it easy / viable / cheap enough that 100x
more self-hosted video providers could exist.

~~~
KGIII
> No, 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.

Emphasis mine.

That's exactly what it looks like to me, more so when I look at it in context
with the rest of the comment they made?

~~~
nkohari
> No, to be clear, if you add up all the _companies_ using all the CDNs you
> mention you only get to about 1,000

It's very clear that he's counting companies using the CDNs to distribute
video content. What would the 1,000 figure refer to otherwise?

~~~
bogomipz
The 1,000 was quantified as "1,000 that are doing so at any meaningful and
interesting scale."

With no indication for what "meaningful and interesting scale" actually means.
I even asked what the criteria was for "meaningful and interesting scale" was.
I received no "meaningful or interesting" response. However I was downvoted
several times.

~~~
KGIII
I got a downvote for asserting that it was a horrible idea and that they'd
suggested we needed 100x that. So, I quoted their post in my next reply.

Maybe someone has vested invested in online video content?

It really is a horrible way to communicate most of the time. It has uses,
don't get me wrong. I don't see it having 100,000 useful uses, however. Every
news site will be nothing but a text blurb and a video, it'll be video all the
way down. It's a horrible idea.

------
therealmarv
Do 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) ?

------
tylermenezes
This 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...](https://techcrunch.com/2013/04/08/yc-backed-tapin-tv-evolves-into-
framebase-to-make-building-video-products-less-painful/)

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.

------
JoeCoder_
> 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?

~~~
bo1024
If 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_
> 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
Agreed. 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.

------
edent
I 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
If you're not willing to pay for the video hosting and serving, you're not
their target audience. YouTube was made for you.

~~~
bubblethink
I 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
The 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
This is so needed. A powerful Youtube alternative which can be setup by the
mainstream.

~~~
toomuchtodo
The value in Youtube is that Google pays for it, not the mainstream.

~~~
rocqua
The 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
Making 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.

------
_eht
I 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
Yes, 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.

~~~
_eht
Nice edit. Were the downvotes getting to you?

~~~
manigandham
Nope.

------
buf
Do you offer audio streaming? I run a site that has 1M+ audio samples
uploaded.

~~~
eastdakota
Yes, we will.

------
alfg
Didn't see any mention of DRM support. Are there any plans to support DRM
packaging? Playready/Widevine/Fairplay/etc.

------
jabo
This 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
Thanks for the heads up. Fixing now.

[https://www.cloudflare.com/products/cloudflare-
stream/](https://www.cloudflare.com/products/cloudflare-stream/)

------
jcampbell1
I 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?

~~~
roboyoshi
Lossless 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
You 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).

------
dmitrygr
> The next Evan Spiegel shouldn’t have to

> know what a megabit per second or H.264 are.

Yes, yes he should

------
Mithorium
Will this be able to handle live streaming, for example using OBS?

~~~
no1youknowz
From 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!

------
spo81rty
In 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.

------
adriancooney
It'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?

~~~
always_good
CloudFlare is in an incredible position for advertising since they are a
proxy.

Imagine just dropping a tag like this onto your page:

    
    
        <display-ad width="300" height="250">
    

And CloudFlare scans your page to figure out the genre of ad to display, does
the live auction, and replaces it with a real ad. Now imagine that for non-
display ads like injected content.

Meanwhile even Google has to crawl your Adsense pages to know what sort of
content to serve. And they have to worry about things like websites serving
different content to GoogleBot. Some interesting possibilities when you're
proxying all of a website's traffic.

Even if Adsense let you render ads server-side by proxying user info to them,
that's a lot more work for every website owner compared to what CloudFlare
could enable since it already is the proxy.

Or imagine CloudFlare encoding live-auctioned ads directly into your videos on
demand as part of the video stream itself.

~~~
shimon_e
If I owned Cloudflare this is the direction I'd go. Ads without the MBs of
bloat that existing ad networks add.

As a cloudflare customer and an everyday internet I am thankful cloudflare
hasn't gone in this direction.

~~~
dx034
On the other hand, ads that load as simple images would be a big step forward
compared to the current situation where rendering ads can max out a CPU.

------
vim_wannabe
Does 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.

------
E7amar
This is not for live streaming Wowza-like no ?

------
bhhaskin
I 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.

------
occultist_throw
Again.. 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.

~~~
jerheinze
As 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.

~~~
zzzcpan
I saw a website recently that I couldn't load. Neither multiple different exit
nodes through tor browser nor clean residential IP though chrome on linux
worked and cloudflare's captcha was impossibly difficult to solve, I gave up
after multiple attempts. Thankfully nice people here reposted the content into
a comment.

Cloudflare still has a long way to go in terms of being nice to humans.

~~~
jerheinze
In that case I would use cached version either through web.archive.org or
Google's cache.

------
nilved
We need to stop Cloudflare.

~~~
manigandham
You realize all their customers willingly use them right? The correct answer
would be to offer better competition.

~~~
always_good
We also need to fix the internet so that DDoSing is harder.

Imagine a world where _all_ ISPs didn't let you spoof IP address. And,
controversially, one where ISP customers had to pay for their SmartToaster's
outbound DoS.

------
omarforgotpwd
z

