Comment by cocktailpeanuts | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cocktailpeanuts | Hacker News Reader

cocktailpeanuts

at first i was very excited just hearing "cloudflare TV", but it doesn't look like this is what i was expecting.

i don't really get the point of this. it's just another live conference broadcasting platform? why would people use this instead of just broadcasting on YouTube? Maybe i'm missing something but feels like just another marketing scheme that came from someone saying "hey this coronavirus is supposed to be the fad of the day for video startups, we should do something too".

the 24/7 aspect is cool and it is this point I was excited about. I thought they would do something different, instead of building a service dedicated to a fad which is probably about to expire.

p.s.

The "online conference" angle is not a good idea. Those who say "all tech conferences will die after coronavirus" have probably never been to tech conferences. Most people go to tech conferences not to watch speeches but to network in person. And there's a big difference between networking in person and doing it online in a public place. This problem may be solved in the future, but not through a live video platform, but probably through an AR or a VR platform.

What were you expecting?

I was not expecting anything that has to do with coronavirus, and I was expecting something that takes advantage of the strengths of cloudflare the company that no one else has.

As I said, the 24/7 idea has huge potential and I think cloudflare is well positioned to do something in this arena.

Let's see how it evolves. As I wrote in the blog post, this is fundamentally a medium to allow us to experiment with new things and see what resonates.

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.

Well, we did have to build that in order to build this. So… possible we'll expose more of that in the future. One step at a time.

Appreciate that the company's founder and leader is on here replying... Even if the OP.

Just want to predict it now - this year's cloudflare birthday thing?

I think one of the interesting things that could come out of this is making it easier for universities (we're talking covid related problems) to stream/record their classes and make O(ish)CW a more accessible thing. Essentially each university has their own YouTube. Then the university could have more control over who has access to what. For example, you can only access lectures to classes you're enrolled in if the uni wants more control.

I think this is one of those problems where you never know how someone is going to use tools until you get your hands on them. I used to work for an engineering firm and when we bought our first 3D printer it was a toy. Then we started to realize that it could build tools that we needed on the fly and soon we had a dozen and they were always printing something. We didn't know how to use it until we had it.

Also, thanks for participating in this thread.

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

Most of these sessions seem to be pre-recorded, so not especially.

> 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.

There's Cloudflare-stream[1] and also Mux[2]

[1] https://www.cloudflare.com/products/cloudflare-stream/ [2] https://mux.com/

Also us at Swarmify[3]

[3] https://swarmify.com/

that's what I was hoping for when I saw the headline!

AWS offers the building blocks for this sort of thing via Elemental Media.

MediaConvert will transcode videos to various formats (MP4, HLS, MPEG Dash, etc).

MediaLive does on the fly transcoding for live streams, allows you to select various destinations (if you have a stream key for YouTube, for instance).

MediaPackage is commonly a destination for MediaLive and will act as an origination for live viewing (ideally with a CloudFront distribution in front of it). It also allows for easily converting the HLS to various outputs provided a timestamp (no frame specific clipping which is annoying); MediaConvert doesn't support HLS as input yet -- although you can do it.

MediaStore is basically a low-latency S3 for storage.

MediaTailor allows for stitching in ads.

So you still have to deal with transcoding, storage, etc. Azure has their own media services and Google uses (or bought?) Anvato. I think their service offerings are all pretty similar, but I could be wrong. Actually looking at Anvato, it looks like they provide a couple additional services.

Note: I don't work for AWS, but work for a video platform and we use AWS exclusively.

Vimeo, through its acquisition of vhx has this OTA solution you have just described.

Not parent, but I thought it were a TV stream that filmed Cloudflare teams solving problems. Similar to the documentary[1] "Aardvark'd: 12 Weeks with Geeks" where they show the life of interns developing an actual product at Fog Creek, the first paying customer, bug fixes, etc.

I appreciated that one, as I did "Code Rush"[3], an embedded documentary following people at Netscape in 1998, even shows the moment Jamie Zawinski bringing the source code and uploading it, or moments where they needed Apple to greenlight using proprietary code, trying to reach Steve Jobs, and ending up implementing it.

Another one I liked was "Downloaded", a documentary about Napster with the main people (Sean Fanning, Sean Parker, Ron Conway, etc.)[4]

PS: Since you're here, I was unable to log to my CloudFlare account for more than a week, reset my password an everything, but always couldn't log in until a couple of days ago. I would have wanted to see a video on the background of the issue and how it was resolved : )

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0NRL7YsXjSg

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aardvark%27d:_12_Weeks_with_Ge...

[3]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Q7FTjhvZ7Y

[4]: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2033981/

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 that needed to be solved — and how they did it."

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?

John is based in Lisbon, so it’s scheduled for his work hours. The live version, which will allow for the audience to interact and ask questions, will be during that time. I’d imagine many of those sessions will make it into our Best Of repository or be played in a recorded version at different times during the week.

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.

I've asked teams in the US offices to volunteer people to come on the show. I imagine that once we get through the first week of this we'll add another Story Time slot so I can talk to people in California easily.

I was kind of hoping for a place where people could broadcast live music concerts. (An alternative to YouTube and Twitch.)

Are music concerts materially different from other activities one would stream live?

I guess traditional audience participation via call and response would at least put a fairly strict upper-bound on latency...

No, they aren't that diffferent. It's just an example of something one might want to do with live video.

Why did you assume that's what this would be?

Fortnite is doing this, oddly enough.

I was hoping for a live streaming system involving Multicast.

Cloudflare seems like the sort of company that could pull that off. Netflix is another, if they did live video.

Congrats with the announcement!

I dont understand the negativity. Looking forward to seeing your channel and your format. Maybe it will work maybe not. Great initiative. I'm from the industry, and people I work with were excited about the news.

Responses here in this thread remind me of /r/linux culture. Strange, it's a HN I haven't seen.

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