Building Cloudflare TV from scratch

Cloudflare TV is inspired by television shows of the 90s that shared the newest, most exciting developments in computing and music videos. We had three basic requirements for Cloudflare TV:

1. Guest participation should be as simple as joining a Zoom call
2. There should be 24x7 programming. Something interesting should be playing all the time
3. Everything should happen in the cloud and we should never have to ask anyone “to leave their computer on” to have the stream running 24 hours a day

We didn’t set out to build Cloudflare TV from scratch

Building a lot of the technology behind Cloudflare TV from scratch was not part of the plan, especially given our aggressive timeline. So why did we decide to pursue it? After evaluating multiple live streaming solutions, we reached the following conclusion:

• 24x7 linear streaming is not something that is a priority for most video streaming platforms. This makes sense: the rise of video-on-demand and event-based live streaming has come at the expense of linear streaming.
• Most broadcasting platforms have their own guest apps which must be downloaded and set up in advance. This introduces unnecessary friction compared to clicking a link in the calendar invite to join a Continue reading

How Cloudflare Streams

Every day, close to 1 billion people watch video through Cloudflare. That’s 100 petabytes of video every month. Last year, video made up 73% of all internet traffic, which is why earlier today we announced Cloudflare Stream, an end to end video solution designed to bring instant video to any device and network connection. Here’s how Stream works to optimize video upload, encoding and delivery.

Uploads

Using Cloudflare Stream starts with a call to the Stream API to /upload a video.

HTTP does not by default provide a reliable upload mechanism for large files, which can make it tricky to upload large media content like high quality video. If there’s any latency in the network connection, a timeout can cancel the entire upload and require the client to start over.

We use an open source upload protocol called Tus which allows for resumable uploads where the upload previously failed. Tus does this by splitting the download into manageable chunks and tracking completed chunks on the server.

Encodes

Video files are containers that hold the video file, the audio track, and some metadata. The video file is compressed by a codec. The codec is a compression algorithm for encoding video Continue reading