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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

#81

Post by nilved »

jerheinze wrote: post #32
occultist_throw wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. If I recall correctly, it was when there was a 200+ comment thread with the top comment being about abusing Tor users WRT Cloudflare. I believe the CEO showed up, and then later ran an internal test on engineers forcing all of them to run through Tor. For a short while, it was significantly better. It probably lasted for 3-5 weeks, and then things fairly quickly progressed back to their usual, namely being ca…

Are you sure that you're using the Tor Browser? If you're shoving up your browser's traffic through Tor and its header is different from the Tor Browser you'll in most cases end up with a captcha. Edit: Also the event you described happened much earlier than when the drop of Cloudflare captchas happened, which was around if I remember correctly when Google announced "invisible captchas".

So how is that a solution? The problem is that Cloudflare blocks Tor, not Tor Browser: not every Tor user uses Tor Browser.

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

#82

Post by chii »

KGIII wrote: post #72
eastdakota wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, to be clear, if you add up all the companies using all the CDNs you mention you only get to about 1,000 that are doing so at any meaningful and interesting scale. That's a shame. There should be 100x that. That's what we want to enable.

Why should there be 100x more? Video is not optimal for lots of information. It's not interactive or easy to cite and reference. It is bandwidth intense and typically has a lower information density per byte than text has. There are plenty of places for video, but I am not so sure we need more of it. I'd say the tendency to put more content into video format is an overall negative trend.

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.

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

#83

Post by snaky »

rocqua wrote: post #50
toomuchtodo wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The value in Youtube is that Google pays for it, not the mainstream.

The value of Youtube is the network of content consumers and producers that use it. The danger of Youtube is it's total monopoly on video discovery. A system like this will make it easier to create Youtube competitors, so when youtube screws over a part of their producers / consumers they have somewhere viable to turn to.

Speaking about monopoly, there are many competing video hosting services in China. That's a quite fruitful competition among them, leading to many of them try to find the niche for itself and lean to some user category or other.

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

#84

Post by always_good »

manigandham wrote: post #45
nilved wrote: post #4

We need to stop Cloudflare.

You realize all their customers willingly use them right? The correct answer would be to offer better competition.

We also need to fix the internet so that DDoSing is harder.

Imagine a world where all ISPs didn't let you spoof IP address. And, controversially, one where ISP customers had to pay for their SmartToaster's outbound DoS.

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

#85

Post by eastdakota »

tomschlick wrote: post #76
eastdakota wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zero.

What about on the monetization side of things? I know many YT firearms channels that have been basically blacklisted from monetization in recent months because YT classifies anything they do as "unsuitable for ads". It has forced a lot to double publish to https://www.full30.com/ to monetize their work.

While we intend to provide ways for our customers to insert advertising or partner with third party advertisers, I don't think we'll be providing an ad network ourselves anytime soon. As a result, end users will have much more control over exactly how their content is monetized.

Using your example, a firearms video stream could stream videos through Cloudflare Stream and sell ads themselves or partner with an ad network that was willing to sell them to an audience that cared about firearms. I totally agree that the one-size-fits-all solution of Facebook or YouTube reverts to the lowest common denominator and, in doing so, will inherently not be right for every publisher.

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

#86

Post by chii »

eastdakota wrote: post #59
sbarre wrote: post #55

So, will Cloudflare have the same kind of DMCA and/or ContentID controls that YouTube has? How will they police the content they stream for their clients/partners? I know a few online businesses that don't use YouTube because they operate in a grey area in terms of fair use on videos (videogame footage) and they don't want to build their video business on YT because of their "trust the claimant over the content produ…

We will respect copyrights and our obligations under the DMCA and other laws outside the United States.

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.

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

#87

Post by always_good »

nilved wrote: post #22
benbristow wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why?

They are monopolizing and centralizing the Web to the detriment of everyone. You don't need to believe me, though: the free and open Web is on a march toward death, Cloudflare is one of the nails in its coffin, and I will be happy enough to say "I told you so" once the grave is filled.

The decentralized web is broken. You can kick almost any website off the internet after sending $2 to a booter. This leads to centralization.

Though of course CloudFlare protects booters as well, but I'm willing to buy their philosophical argument.

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

#88

Post by JakeTheAndroid »

mugsie wrote: post #56
eugeneionesco wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost instant DNS change is something that I kinda take for granted. Surprising that's so rare...

well ... the protocol was designed not do that. DNS is "just" a globally distributed, eventually consistent, key:value store, with a ton of caching built into it. Also, while it may look instant to you, it may not be to your customers / users / other internet people.

While DNS caches can sometimes impact DNS updates, we rebuild the entire zone file when a DNS value is updated, and purge the previous cache. Even for customers, this should happen pretty quickly. We maintain a 5 minute TTL on all proxied records internally. So, this happens much faster than most other DNS services.

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

#89

Post by KGIII »

chii wrote: post #82
KGIII wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should there be 100x more? Video is not optimal for lots of information. It's not interactive or easy to cite and reference. It is bandwidth intense and typically has a lower information density per byte than text has. There are plenty of places for video, but I am not so sure we need more of it. I'd say the tendency to put more content into video format is an overall negative trend.

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.

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

#90

Post by JoeCoder_ »

bo1024 wrote: post #73
JoeCoder_ wrote: post #61

> There's no good technical reason not to enable lossless compression Why would you want to losslessly compress audio or video? The resulting files would be huge--often too huge to steam. Lossy compression is what you want. I must be misunderstanding the article?

If you read on for context, it sounds like they are comparing to the case where the customer simply sends some uncompressed video file, and pointing out that you might as well enable lossless compression in this case. However, CDNs (or somebody) introduce technical obstacles for this because they charge by bandwidth, so compression would hurt their profits.

> uncompressed video file

1920x1080 at 3 bytes per pixel and 30 frames per second is 11GB for just one minute of video, and 186MB per second. That's far too big and expensive to stream, and outside of somewhat special circumstances I've never heard of anyone storing video in such a huge format.

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