Hacker News Reader

Comment by ireflect | Hacker News Reader

This is really interesting and I hope it's a success. It seems like it's intended to be 80% useful and 20% tongue-in-cheek joke.

I'm skeptical that viewers will prefer this live scheduled format rather than simply posting all the videos to be viewed on-demand. Don't get me wrong, I love the idea of this anachronism (and especially their 80s-era channel ID logo to go along with it) but personally I prefer to consume videos from tech conferences on-demand. [1]

It looks like they are also posting the videos for on-demand viewing in the Best-Of section, so maybe the live scheduled format is just a delightful gimmick.

[1] https://media.ccc.de is my favourite

View on HN

I think 'live' television serves as an effective master clock for synchronizing shared experiences. I would expect that it's especially effective when the community of people who share a common interest is large enough that peer to peer election of that kind of timing authority would be infeasible without for-purpose technical infrastructure that either currently doesn't exist, or is so niche that the results are equivalent.

Synchronized experience seems to enable some pretty powerful community interactions around discussion and participation that just don't seem to coalesce into a critical mass when everyone experiences (and then comments and participates) asynchronously.

If you assume in advance that the same number of people will either tune in live or watch a stream non-synchronized, you may have a point. The problem is, once you account for the liveness also making it so fewer people tune in, it's not clear to me it's a win.

I haven't been beholden to a TV schedule in... ummm... about seventeen years, I think? 2003 sounds about right for my first TiVo. (I was fresh out of college and still affected by the bubble burst, I had to wait for them to come down in price quite a bit.) The only thing I watch live are the occasional sports program and SpaceX launches. Having an actual schedule certainly shoots my personal interest to zippo in this particular product.

If I can go back and watch things, which is not at the moment clear to me, then there's at least a possibility that I would become interested enough in some particular thing to tune in live. But if live viewing is the only option, you're never going to get my attention.

Live video survives in two situations: when you need to see the outcome as it happens (e.g. sports) and when the primary draw is individuals and interacting with them (e.g. streamers).

> I think 'live' television serves as an effective master clock for synchronizing shared experiences.

Maybe in certain time zones. We’re well into Monday afternoon here, but Cloudflare TV looks like Sunday afternoon in the 80’s - i.e. nothing to watch.

We think interactivity is key, hence why we are prioritizing as much live content as we can. Site will become more and more interactive over time.

Oh cool, that makes sense. I wish you all the best!

Somewhat tongue in cheek, but you would do well to find a Maria Bartiromo for Cloudflare TV.

A decade + ago, one of my closest friends was a day trader, and while inherently skeptical of CNBC, he and his cohort routinely tuned in to watch her.

Why is it one cannot still register a new domain using Cloudflare? As someone who worked at a registrar before and managed ICANN compliance and registry connections, this isn’t a hard problem at all.

As a long time user, customer and promoter, this is puzzling to me to see change in direction and lack of product focus on what brought initial interest (DNS) to Cloudflare in the tech world first with the VPN stuff and now this TV stuff.

I listen to a lot of talk radio (or otherwise out of leftfield radio) and a big part of the appeal is I never know exactly what I'm going to experience. I watch a lot of YouTube, etc, as well but it's a different self-curated experience where I'm choosing in advance, whereas tuning into a live radio station means I'm going to hear something I'm not expecting even if I don't like it.

Can Cloudflare put enough varied programming to make their "TV" channel similarly surprising if you tune in at random? Hard to say, but it would be neat if they managed to pull it off.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com