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Cloudflare Stream – Combines video encoding, global delivery, and player

blog.cloudflare.com

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Re: Cloudflare Stream – Combines video encoding, global delivery, and player

#131

Post by azinman2 »

MikusR wrote: post #92
OzzyB wrote: post #54

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?

It depends on the mood of their CEO.

I think this is rediculius. If they took down child porn, would you also have an issue with this? What about a phishing site hosting malware and capturing passwords for the Russian mafia? It seems clear to me you can’t be 100% agnostic to your content.

There is a huge gap between “conservative bent” and those trying to actively incite violence in the name of Hitler. And that they’ve only removed ONE such site across all their hosted properties is hardly an indication that their CEO is randomly moody. A single data point is not a trend.

Re: Cloudflare Stream – Combines video encoding, global delivery, and player

#132

Post by always_good »

KGIII wrote: post #89
chii wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

Re: Cloudflare Stream – Combines video encoding, global delivery, and player

#133

Post by goony »

OzzyB wrote: post #54

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?

Just use something like https://pullgrid.com/ where you can host it from your dropbox or google drive and distributed through webtorrent. Or use https://vid.me/ or https://bitchute.com/

Re: Cloudflare Stream – Combines video encoding, global delivery, and player

#134

Post by lsmarigo »

OzzyB wrote: post #54

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?

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.

Re: Cloudflare Stream – Combines video encoding, global delivery, and player

#135

Post by always_good »

adriancooney wrote: post #9

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?

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

Imagine just dropping a tag like this onto your page:
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.

Re: Cloudflare Stream – Combines video encoding, global delivery, and player

#136

Post by usrusr »

bubblethink wrote: post #118
sbarre wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

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.

Re: Cloudflare Stream – Combines video encoding, global delivery, and player

#137

Post by fizx »

r2dnb wrote: post #103
eastdakota wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Just 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.

Same. I was excited until I saw no pricing. Representing a 7+ figure yearly budget for this.

Re: Cloudflare Stream – Combines video encoding, global delivery, and player

#139

Post by Karunamon »

Spivak wrote: post #116
chii wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the only acceptable DMCA obligation for cloudflare is to forward the DMCA takedown notice to the customer who uploaded the video, and let them choose to handle the notice the way they decide! Any other method is game-able by large media companies to enforce their copyright on fair use that they arent allowed to enforce.

How is YT different in this regard? Why are they the end user for the DMCA request but CF wouldn't be?

Because YT chose to insert themselves in front of the DMCA.

When someone copyright claims your video, they're not actually sending a DMCA, they're doing a YT-specific process that just happens to look sorta like the DMCA notice/counternotice process without involving the legal system.

Re: Cloudflare Stream – Combines video encoding, global delivery, and player

#140

Post by Karunamon »

azinman2 wrote: post #131
MikusR wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends on the mood of their CEO.

I think this is rediculius. If they took down child porn, would you also have an issue with this? What about a phishing site hosting malware and capturing passwords for the Russian mafia? It seems clear to me you can’t be 100% agnostic to your content. There is a huge gap between “conservative bent” and those trying to actively incite violence in the name of Hitler. And that they’ve only removed ONE such site across…

And that they’ve only removed ONE such site across all their hosted properties is hardly an indication that their CEO is randomly moody.

If you read the blog[1] regarding that incident, it provides a lot more evidence than the datapoint of the removal. It also completely undermines Cloudflare's claims of being content-neutral. Given that content neutrality is a binary state...

[1]: https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer/

Also hosted by cloudflare: ISIS sites, which are a lot more of a clear and present danger to real people than a bunch of racists. That means the standard has gone from content neutrality - to content neutrality so long as you don't imply things the CEO doesn't like. I.e. not neutral.

From the blog:

>And, after today, make no mistake, it will be a little bit harder for us to argue against a government somewhere pressuring us into taking down a site they don't like.

Anything I can say about this will be ridiculously snarky, but this is the hill you chose to sacrifice your principles on, Matthew? Really?

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