
Building Cloudflare TV from Scratch - mxschmitt
https://blog.cloudflare.com/building-cloudflare-tv-from-scratch/
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TechBro8615
It’s an interesting experiment, albeit one that doesn’t make much sense to me
from a product perspective. I guess producing the content at a loss is
something Cloudflare is uniquely positioned to do. And it’s probably a good
chance to dogfood some video delivery products.

Personally, I would almost always prefer a blog format over a live segment. If
it is a live segment, then I’d hope I can at least watch the recording later.

I’m curious about engagement. Is anyone watching this? Does anyone seem to
actually care?

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sm2i
Yeah, I'm not sure what are they thinking... i have some calendar reminders
popup from time-to-time on an interesting _broadcast_, but not once i actually
sit down to watch it. Shame, as there're 4-5 programs every week i would be
happy to watch on-demand

~~~
corobo
I asked about this, they’re working on making them available on demand :)

src:
[https://twitter.com/cloudflarehelp/status/127293910658317107...](https://twitter.com/cloudflarehelp/status/1272939106583171072?s=21)

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eastdakota
Here's the original motivation for the project:

[https://blog.cloudflare.com/ladies-and-gentlemen-
cloudflare-...](https://blog.cloudflare.com/ladies-and-gentlemen-cloudflare-
tv/)

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paulpan
Very cool for multiple reasons! The first is that it seems a lightweight and
straightforward approach to launch first and thereafter iteratively improve,
e.g. using Zoom to push live video to Cloudflare. Secondly the content, while
all Cloudflare-related, seems useful to learn about internet infrastructure,
etc.

Perhaps the elephant in the room is "what's next"? Seems like it could at
least become a Twitch competitor, if not also to YouTube if Cloudflare is able
to figure out the monetization, privacy and copyright aspects.

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mike_d
Given all the important things sitting behind Cloudflare, how do you justify
having Zoom installed on employee machines?

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carlosdp
> When the live programming ends at 1100, the video experience would break and
> the user would need to hit refresh to see the next show on the schedule.

If that was the only problem, why wouldn't changing the stream with a small
amount of JS have worked rather than having to add a muxing layer in front of
the streams?

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kevmo314
I wonder if they have plans to expand to non-browser viewports?

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vanshg
They do. From the last section of the article, entitled "Thinking Ahead..."

> Bring Cloudflare TV to platforms like Apple TV and Roku

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anonms-coward
Is cloudflare at a scale where it would be possible for them to provide cheap
enough prices on video hosting and bandwidth to enable someone to build a
profitable YouTube alternative on top of that? Assuming that a youtube
competitor can get to similar scale and make similar revenue.

~~~
paulpan
The competitive advantage of YouTube isn't really in video storage or
bandwidth, but rather in its creators community and ad revenue
sharing/monetization. Also copyright, regulatory compliance, content
moderation are non-trivial.

These are the causes (among many others) that sunk Microsoft's Mixer and
potentially Facebook Watch...

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monkeywork
youtubes competitive advantage is search... that plus the simple scale of
users and content.

~~~
solarkraft
> youtubes competitive advantage is search

How? YouTube videos aren't all that prominent on Google and its search
features are rather terrible.

What they do have is a semi working recommendations system. How hard would
that be to replicate?

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Raed667
I can't wait for this to become available as part of Cloudflare Stream!

I need a simple API that would allow both a basic user with browser and a
webcam, or an advanced one with OBS (RMTP...) to just live-stream as part of
my product. And building everything at scale is just super painful.

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dmix
Seems very close to "rolling your own (internet) TV station using open source
and Zoom".

That's exciting that it's become so accessible.

Of course the hard part then is having a producer running the content all day
+ getting enough content.

~~~
trynewideas
> the hard part then is having a producer running the content all day +
> getting enough content

If I'm managing a local access/community TV/open studio system right now, I'd
be pulling as much inspiration as possible from this post and working to
deploy something similar ASAP. Those places already have the content, and
their cable and broadcast reach is either less viable or actively reduced each
year.

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ra
Hmmm.. works in Chrome but not Firefox for me. Firefox plays the live stream
but not recorded videos.

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colesantiago
Will there be any support for DRM or video protection?

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DarkWiiPlayer
It's 2020, shouldn't we have learned by now that DRM software is pointless in
almost any situation?

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colesantiago
If it is pointless in 2020, why does Netflix have DRM then?

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Shacklz
Wild guess (I really have no idea): Because otherwise they wouldn't get the
licenses for their bought content to begin with?

Netflix themselves probably couldn't care less; they know that everything they
offer for streaming will be available for pirating the second its released,
with or without DRM; people have Netflix because its convenient, not because
they cannot pirate their content.

~~~
DarkWiiPlayer
That only shifts the blame to the contenc owners though; they still hold on to
the idea that DRM will somehow keep their content unpirated while it really
has the opposite effect.

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kevincox
Yes, and I blame bureaucracy for making it hard to say no to ineffective
ideas. "You mean you want it to be easy for people to steal our content‽" I
think the world has a hard problem saying no to ideas because they cost too
much. Even if it has a minor effect it must be done!

But there is one real benefit of DRM, cracking it is illegal. Of course my
understanding is that they would get the exact same legal protections here if
they just XORed every byte with 0x42 so it doesn't justify the spend, user
inconvenience and complexity of current DRM systems.

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unityByFreedom
> Cloudflare TV is a 24x7 TV channel that takes you behind-the-scenes and
> let’s you hear directly from the builders working on your favorite
> Cloudflare products.

So 24x7 monitoring of developers' screens overseen by the _world_? RIP devs
X_X

~~~
corobo
No, not that at all.

Has anyone online ever done a “so what you mean is..” and got it right?

