Cloudflare TV • Hacker News Board

Re: Cloudflare TV

#121

Post by toohotatopic » Mon, Jun 08, 2020, 4:53 AM UTC

cirno wrote: post #108

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd argue CDN services are our best defense against centralization like AWS and GCP. Cloudflare makes it possible for me to host something out of my house without getting taken down by a mild amount of attention.

Outside of DoS'ing (which is admittedly Cloudflare's wheelhouse, but a rare concern if you aren't posting anything controversial or in a highly competitive space), you can host a site on a $5/month VPS and very trivially withstand being the top post on HN, making Reddit r/all, etc. Not even 10% CPU utilization at peak. And that's without even going to the extreme of making your site static.

Now do the same with video streaming ...

Re: Cloudflare TV

#122

Post by colechristensen » Mon, Jun 08, 2020, 4:57 AM UTC

ShamelessC wrote: post #71

trog wrote: post #56

I'm a generally technical person and I'm simply flat out uninterested in video content - the stuff that will be on this sounds broadly interesting to me but I'd rather read it in article format. I understand video "performs" well in a lot of contexts (and thus is of particular interest to marketing people) but I am always surprised when content targeted broadly towards the technical community is done in a video-first…

I've noticed certain communities that live on the edge of tech-savvy do this a lot. In particular emulator and jailbreak communities for video game consoles refuse to keep up-to-date text guides on things. Everything is done on YouTube which is such a terrible format when you need to follow 30-step lists and pause to click on many links throughout the process to download software, firmware and exploits.

Honestly, a hard to follow YouTube video is better than digging through hundreds of pages of forum posts in attempts to find the right one. Of course clear, concise, and findable documentation is always better, but at least if someone is doing it on youtube there is demonstrable evidence that the process functioned once.

Re: Cloudflare TV

#123

Post by FearNotDaniel » Mon, Jun 08, 2020, 4:58 AM UTC

lstamour wrote: post #54

eastdakota wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's an interesting idea. Will suggest to the programming team. Probably tricky while we're all working from home. But… maybe in the future. A mini version of that is a show that John Graham-Cumming, our CTO, is going to be hosting weekly: https://cloudflare.tv/schedule/3RbW4iJZAbfN9OetUovuQ2 "Join Cloudflare CTO John Graham-Cumming as he interviews Cloudflare engineers and they discuss a 'war story' of a problem t…

That does sound interesting, but the link says it streams 6:30-7am. (I presume that’s a local time for my time zone?) Any chance it will show up as a podcast or on YouTube, or available to watch at another time?

Glad to see I'm not the only one actually scratching my head over time zones. It's a genius move to auto display times in the local user's zone but would be super helpful to state that fact somewhere otherwise I'm going to shrug and assume they're probably PDT or EDT and start doing mental arithmetic in my head while worrying I might have got the daylight savings wrong at either end. Bonus points for telling me what time zone you think I'm in... I have worked for companies that proxy all traffic through a different country, leading to not only a ton of dutch-language banner ads but timezone confusion to boot.

Re: Cloudflare TV

#124

Post by toomanybeersies » Mon, Jun 08, 2020, 5:00 AM UTC

trog wrote: post #56

I'm a generally technical person and I'm simply flat out uninterested in video content - the stuff that will be on this sounds broadly interesting to me but I'd rather read it in article format. I understand video "performs" well in a lot of contexts (and thus is of particular interest to marketing people) but I am always surprised when content targeted broadly towards the technical community is done in a video-first…

I'm in the same boat. I can learn by reading faster than I can watching a video (I tended to skip lectures at university for this reason). Also, often I have partial understanding of the subject already and need clarification of certain points, and it's a lot easier to skim a text and find the information I need than trying to skip through a video to find what I need.

Re: Cloudflare TV

#125

Post by trog » Mon, Jun 08, 2020, 5:02 AM UTC

eastdakota wrote: post #78

trog wrote: post #56

I'm a generally technical person and I'm simply flat out uninterested in video content - the stuff that will be on this sounds broadly interesting to me but I'd rather read it in article format. I understand video "performs" well in a lot of contexts (and thus is of particular interest to marketing people) but I am always surprised when content targeted broadly towards the technical community is done in a video-first…

Why for the last 10 years we’ve invested so much in https://blog.cloudflare.com . I’d think of this as supplementing that, and allowing you to interact live with many of the blog’s authors, rather than replacing it.

Thanks for the reply - I have been subscribed to the Cloudflare blog for years and really enjoy reading many of the in-depth technical articles that are provided by the team. I have shared many of them both internally in my workplace and on a few other channels.

I think I have interacted with authors on the blog a few times via comments - for me doing it "asynchronously" is probably going to be more applicable to me anyway.

I'll definitely check it out as time permits but just wanted to mention my preferences are definitely more on the written side :) Thanks for reading & again for your response.

Re: Cloudflare TV

#126

Post by nine_k » Mon, Jun 08, 2020, 5:06 AM UTC

ShamelessC wrote: post #71

trog wrote: post #56

I'm a generally technical person and I'm simply flat out uninterested in video content - the stuff that will be on this sounds broadly interesting to me but I'd rather read it in article format. I understand video "performs" well in a lot of contexts (and thus is of particular interest to marketing people) but I am always surprised when content targeted broadly towards the technical community is done in a video-first…

I've noticed certain communities that live on the edge of tech-savvy do this a lot. In particular emulator and jailbreak communities for video game consoles refuse to keep up-to-date text guides on things. Everything is done on YouTube which is such a terrible format when you need to follow 30-step lists and pause to click on many links throughout the process to download software, firmware and exploits.

I suppose that this makes some important words they say hard to search for, and thus hard to automatically detect and file a DMCA or copyright infringement note.

So it could be some security via format obscurity.

Re: Cloudflare TV

#127

Post by tialaramex » Mon, Jun 08, 2020, 5:07 AM UTC

ironhaven wrote: post #94

Something similar to this is Game Done Quick[1] which is a week long speed running competition. Because it is always streaming you can turn it on and see what game is being played. I would look at the schedule and make plans. "better tune in Wednesday because they are playing brood war". I might tune in to this "Cloudflare TV". Also when i was watching the best of video on bots there was a error saying "Quota exceede…

Brood War seems like a weird example because it's mainly a multi-player game. Did somebody really run the SC1 Brood War single player campaign at a GDQ? Or were you just picking a random game name as an example?

I mostly watch TAS Block myself.

Re: Cloudflare TV

#128

Post by nine_k » Mon, Jun 08, 2020, 5:09 AM UTC

hanniabu wrote: post #101

fomojola wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Medium? I'd think there's money there, just not sure for whom.

I'm actually surprised they don't introduce unskippable ads into articles to let content producers monetize their articles. Rather than the static ads and paywalls you can have the intro paragraph visible and then a "watch to unlock article" ad. Just like youtube with their 10min requirement, Medium can make requirements like the article needs to be more than 1000 words for 2 ads or something like that. Granted, this…

Are youtube ads really unskippable with youtube-dl, VLC, and other similar tools?

Much like DVD ads used to be unskippable, but only for the non-tech-savvy.

Re: Cloudflare TV

#129

Post by shockinglytrue » Mon, Jun 08, 2020, 5:09 AM UTC

leourbina wrote: post #39

owaislone wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was expecting a video streaming CDN so anyone could build a Youtube/Twitch competitor without having to deal with storing, transcoding and (live)streaming video. I vaguely remember AWS offering something like this. Not sure how much money there is in this market but definitely sounds like a great product fit for someone like Cloudflare.

Cloudflare already does this ( https://www.cloudflare.com/products/cloudflare-stream/ ) I'd be willing to bet that Cloudflare TV is built on top of their Stream infrastructure.

Stream is for VOD, live TV is an entirely different problem

Re: Cloudflare TV

#130

Post by nine_k » Mon, Jun 08, 2020, 5:13 AM UTC

adventist wrote: post #83

stimpson_j_cat wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Text transcripts should be available out of a11y concerns alone

What are those concerns?

  len('accessibility') == 13

So a11y stands for "a word starting with 'a' then 11 letters then ending with 'y'".

Compare to i18n, l10n.