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Comment by owaislone | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

> 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/

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.

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

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

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