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Cloudflare launches Stream video service

As its name suggests, Stream is a service for hosting and streaming video online.
Written by Natalie Gagliordi, Contributor
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Cloudflare announced Wednesday that it's officially entering the video streaming market with the launch of Cloudflare Stream.

As its name suggests, Stream is a service for hosting and streaming video online. The San Francisco, Calif.-based networking and website protection company said the new platform is part of an effort "to fix both the technical and business issues that have plagued the video streaming market to date."

Cloudflare currently works with sites that stream video, but those videos are typically hosted by a third-party platform. With Stream, Cloudflare will offer an all-inclusive content delivery network that combines encoding, global delivery and a media player into one package.

Cloudflare said the goal is to give sites the ease of YouTube with the power and control you would expect from a bespoke system.

"It's nuts that video isn't a part of more products," said Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince, in a blog post. "We hope we can help fix that. Ultimately our goal is to expand the number of companies that are streaming video from 1,000 to 100,000. The next Evan Spiegel shouldn't have to know what a megabit per second or H.264 are."

Cloudlflare hasn't released pricing details, but Prince did say that the company plans to charge based on how long a video is streamed. That way, both Cloudflare and its customers are aligned in supporting the most efficient coding as it comes to market.

"At any given video quality, we want to be the low cost provider -- but with incentives to continue to invest in our platform to make it faster, more efficient, and less expensive," Prince wrote. "And, more than that, we want to open the market."

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