Lights, Camera, Action! Business and Pro customers get bundled streaming video

Beginning December 1, 2022, if you have a Business or Pro subscription, you will receive a complimentary allocation of Cloudflare Stream. Here’s what this means:

• All Cloudflare customers with a Biz or Pro domain will be able to store up to 100 minutes of video content and deliver up to 10,000 minutes of video content each month at no additional cost
• If you need additional storage or delivery beyond the complimentary allocation, you will be able to upgrade to a paid Stream subscription from the Stream Dashboard.

Cloudflare Stream simplifies storage, encoding and playback of videos. You can use the free allocation of Cloudflare Stream for various use cases, such as background/hero videos, e-commerce product videos, how-to guides and customer testimonials.

Upload videos with no code

To upload your first video Stream, simply visit the Stream Dashboard and drag-and-drop the video file:

Once you upload a video, Stream will store and encode your video. Stream automatically optimizes your video uploads by creating multiple versions of it at different quality levels. This happens behind-the-scenes and requires no extra effort from your side. The Stream Player automatically selects the optimal quality level based on your website visitor’s Internet connection using a technology Continue reading

Build real-time video and audio apps on the world’s most interconnected network

This post is also available in 简体中文, 日本語 and Español.

In the last two years, there has been a rapid rise in real-time apps that help groups of people get together virtually with near-zero latency. User expectations have also increased: your users expect real-time video and audio features to work flawlessly. We found that developers building real-time apps want to spend less time building and maintaining low-level infrastructure. Developers also told us they want to spend more time building features that truly make their idea special.

So today, we are announcing a new product that lets developers build real-time audio/video apps. Cloudflare Calls exposes a set of APIs that allows you to build things like:

• A video conferencing app with a custom UI
• An interactive conversation where the moderators can invite select audience members “on stage” as speakers
• A privacy-first group workout app where only the instructor can view all the participants while the participants can only view the instructor
• Remote 'fireside chats' where one or multiple people can have a video call with an audience of 10,000+ people in real time (<100ms delay)

The protocol that makes all this possible is WebRTC. And Cloudflare Calls is the product Continue reading

Bring your own ingest domain to Stream Live

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 Continue reading

Serverless Live Streaming with Cloudflare Stream

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:

1. “Which codec(s) are we going to use to encode the videos?”
2. “Which protocols are we going to use to ingest and deliver videos?”
3. “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 Continue reading

Cloudflare Images Now Available to Everyone

Today, we are launching Cloudflare Images for all customers. Images is a single product that stores, resizes, optimizes and serves images. We built Cloudflare Images so customers of all sizes can build a scalable and affordable image pipeline in minutes.

Store images efficiently

Many legacy image pipelines are architected to take an image and create multiple copies of it to account for different sizes and formats. These copies are then stored in a storage bucket and delivered using a CDN. This architecture can be hard to maintain and adds infrastructure cost in unpredictable ways.

With Cloudflare Images, you don’t need to worry about creating and storing multiple versions of the same image in different sizes and formats. Cloudflare Images makes a clear distinction between your stored images and the variants. Once you upload an image, you can apply any defined variant to the uploaded image. The variants and different formats don’t count towards your stored images quota.

This means that when a user uploads a picture that you need to resize in three different ways and serve in two different formats, you pay for one stored image instead of seven different images (the original, plus three variants for each of Continue reading

Announcing Cloudflare Images beta to simplify your image pipeline

Today, we are announcing the beta of Cloudflare Images: a simple service to store, resize, optimize, and deliver images at scale.

In 2018, we launched Stream to provide a single product that could be used to store, encode, and deliver videos. With Cloudflare Images, we are doing for images what Stream did for videos. Just like Stream, Cloudflare Images eliminates the need to think about storage buckets, egress costs, and many other common problems that are solved for you out of the box. Whether you are building an ecommerce platform with millions of high-res product pictures and videos or a new app for creators, you can build your entire media pipeline by combining Cloudflare Images and Stream.

Fundamental questions for storing and serving images

Any time you are building infrastructure for image storage and processing, there are four fundamental questions you must answer:

1. “Where do we store images?”
2. “How do we secure, resize, and optimize the images for different use cases?”
3. “How do we serve the images to our users reliably?”
4. “How do we do all of these things at scale while having predictable and affordable pricing, especially during spikes?”

Cloudflare Images has a straightforward set Continue reading

Live stream to multiple platforms with Stream Connect

Today, we are announcing the Stream Connect beta, the first step towards supporting end-to-end live broadcasting on Cloudflare. You can use Stream Connect to push RTMPS feeds to the Cloudflare edge and have it restreamed to your audience on any platform that supports RTMPS such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitch.

What is restreaming?

Facebook, YouTube and Twitch are great platforms for creators to broadcast live video to reach billions. They each have their own unique communities and benefits for creators. If you have a band and want to broadcast a live performance for your fans, broadcasting to only one platform limits your reach. Restreaming enables you to push the live video to multiple platforms at the same time so you can meet your fans on their preferred platform.

Live video platforms accept incoming connections using a protocol called RTMP or RTMPS. Stream Connect allows you to continue using the same protocol as before. However, instead of using your local connection to send the video feed to multiple platforms, you only send it to Stream Connect. Connect uses the Cloudflare network to send your live feed to the configured media platforms.

How Stream Connect increases reliability and lowers latency

Eliminating the Continue reading

Remote Work Isn’t Just Video Conferencing: How We Built CloudflareTV

At Cloudflare, we produce all types of video content, ranging from recordings of our Weekly All-Hands to product demos. Being able to stream video on demand has two major advantages when compared to live video:

1. It encourages asynchronous communication within the organization
2. It extends the life time value of the shared knowledge

Historically, we haven’t had a central, secure repository of all video content that could be easily accessed from the browser. Various teams choose their own platform to share the content. If I wanted to find a recording of a product demo, for example, I’d need to search Google Drive, Gmail and Google Chat with creative keywords. Very often, I would need to reach out to individual teams to finally locate the content.

So we decided we wanted to build CloudflareTV, an internal Netflix-like application that can only be accessed by Cloudflare employees and has all of our videos neatly organized and immediately watchable from the browser.

We wanted to achieve the following when building CloudflareTV:

• Security: make sure the videos are access controlled and not publicly accessible
• Authentication: ensure the application can only be accessed by Cloudflare employees
• Tagging: allow the videos to be categorized so they can Continue reading

Use Cloudflare Stream to build secure, reliable video apps

It’s our pleasure to announce the general availability of Cloudflare Stream. Cloudflare Stream is the best way for any founder or developer to deliver an extraordinary video experience to their viewers while cutting development time and costs, and as of today it is available to every Cloudflare customer.

If I had to summarize what we’ve learned as we’ve built Stream it would be: Video streaming is hard, but building a successful video streaming business is even harder. This is why our goal has been to take away the complexity of encoding, storage, and smooth delivery so you can focus on all the other critical parts of your business.

Cloudflare Stream API

You call a single endpoint, Cloudflare Stream delivers a high-quality streaming experience to your visitors. Here’s how it works:

1. Your app calls the /stream endpoint to upload a video. You can submit the contents of the video with the request or you can provide a URL to a video hosted elsewhere.
2. Cloudflare Stream encodes the stream in multiple resolutions to enable multi-bitrate streaming. We also automatically prepare DASH and HLS manifest files.
3. Cloudflare serves your video (in multiple resolutions) from our vast network of 150+ data centers around the Continue reading