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Video Streaming with Cloudflare Stream

44 posts · Sep 2017 – Jul 2026

What this trail covers

Cloudflare Stream has evolved to offer first-class portrait (vertical) video support, automatically processing newly uploaded or ingested portrait videos in full HD quality. This addresses a previous limitation where portrait videos were encoded with lower quality dimensions, leading to a grainy appearance on portrait-first devices. The encoding pipeline has been updated to use a constrained target width for portrait videos, generating resolutions from 240x426 up to 1080x1920. This change impacts the Stream API service, the on-the-fly encoding pipeline (hosted on Cloudflare Workers), and the Stream player's quality selection labels. Post-release, a bug causing negative bitrates for some portrait livestream renditions and another causing download failures for very small videos were identified and fixed. The PSNR metric shows an increase in quality up to 8% for portrait videos.

All Cloudflare trails
  1. An API for MoQ: provision your own isolated relaysIntroduced a MoQ provisioning API that allows users to create isolated relays across Cloudflare's global network. This API provides control plane functionality for managing relays and issuing separate credentials (tokens) for publishers and subscribers, enabling access control and confidentiality for MoQ-based applications. The API supports draft-14 and draft-16 of the MoQ Transport protocol, including new features like PUBLISH and SUBSCRIBE_NAMESPACE in draft-16. The design of the API is documented in an Internet-Draft for potential standardization across relay providers. The service is currently free during beta.
  2. Innovating to address streaming abuse — and our latest transparency reportThis post details Cloudflare's technical and operational innovations to address unauthorized streaming and copyright infringement. It describes the development of an API for rightsholders to report abuse, feedback mechanisms to improve report quality, and the use of internal metrics to respond to streaming reports at scale. It also highlights the enhancement of technical tools for preventing unauthorized streaming on non-hosted services, leveraging rightsholder reports as signals. The post mentions the use of AI and machine learning in detecting and mitigating abusive conduct, and how information from streaming abuse efforts is applied to broader cybersecurity initiatives.
  3. Extract audio from your videos with Cloudflare StreamThis post introduces audio extraction capabilities for Cloudflare Stream. It extends the existing Media Transformations service to extract audio-only M4A tracks on-the-fly by adding a `mode=audio` parameter to transformation URLs. It also adds audio-only download functionality to the Video-on-Demand (VOD) pipeline, with new API endpoints and asynchronous job processing for creating M4A files. The implementation involved extending validation logic in the OTFE pipeline to check for audio tracks and building a new transformation handler to discard visual tracks. For the VOD pipeline, new type-specific API endpoints were introduced, and the asynchronous queue consumer was updated to handle audio download types and use ffmpeg templates for M4A encoding.
  4. MoQ: Refactoring the Internet's real-time media stackThis post introduces Media over QUIC (MoQ) as a new protocol and Cloudflare's launch of a MoQ relay network. It details the historical compromises in real-time media streaming (RTMP, HLS/DASH, WebRTC) and positions MoQ as a solution that combines low-latency interactivity, broadcast scale, and architectural simplicity. The post explains MoQ's data model (tracks, groups, objects) and its network architecture (publishers, subscribers, relays). It highlights the benefits of building on QUIC, such as eliminating head-of-line blocking and enabling fast connection establishment. The core innovation is described as a publish/subscribe system for media, allowing for efficient fan-out of media tracks.
  5. Make your apps truly interactive with Cloudflare Realtime and RealtimeKitIntroduces Cloudflare Realtime, a suite of products for real-time audio and video experiences, and RealtimeKit, a collection of mobile and web SDKs and server-side services designed to simplify the development of real-time voice, video, and AI applications by abstracting WebRTC complexities. Highlights the acquisition of the Dyte team to accelerate RealtimeKit development. Announces the General Availability of Cloudflare's SFU and TURN services, with SFU now supporting simulcast and TURN offering advanced analytics. Details a partnership with Hugging Face to provide free TURN bandwidth for FastRTC users.
  7. Dynamically optimize, clip, and resize video from any origin with Media TransformationsIntroduces Media Transformations, a new service that extends Cloudflare Images' transformation capabilities to short-form video files stored externally (e.g., R2, S3). This allows for dynamic resizing, clipping, frame extraction, and audio removal of MP4 videos via URL parameters, leveraging the same infrastructure as Image Transformations. The service operates via the `/cdn-cgi/media/` endpoint and is free during beta, with future billing aligned with Image Transformations.
  8. Behind the scenes with Stream Live, Cloudflare’s live streaming serviceThis post details the internal architecture and design of Cloudflare Stream Live, focusing on its ingest and delivery mechanisms. It explains how Anycast IPs, Spectrum, Durable Objects, and R2 are used to handle real-time broadcast ingestion, state management, and content storage. It also describes the process of generating HLS/DASH playlists and serving segmented video content to viewers, highlighting the use of internal representations for tracks, renditions, and muxings. The post also touches on the challenges of handling different ingest protocols (RTMPS, SRT, WHIP) and the need for robust state management to support broadcast resumption.
  9. Introducing high-definition portrait video support for Cloudflare StreamThis post details the technical implementation of high-definition portrait video support for Cloudflare Stream. The core change involves modifying the video encoding pipeline to identify and process portrait videos using a constrained target width instead of solely relying on height. This required updates to the Stream API service to enqueue portrait-specific encoding jobs and modifications to the on-the-fly encoding pipeline (hosted on Cloudflare Workers) to generate portrait renditions. The Stream player's quality selection labels were also updated to reflect the new portrait resolutions. The post also discusses two post-release bugs: one related to negative bitrates for portrait livestream renditions due to incorrect use of constraining dimensions for bitrate observation, and another causing download failures for small videos due to incorrect aspect ratio scaling. These bugs were addressed by expanding end-to-end testing and adding more unit tests for small videos.
  10. Introducing Stream Generated Captions, powered by Workers AIIntroduced AI-generated captions for on-demand videos and live stream recordings within Cloudflare Stream, leveraging Workers AI and the Whisper model. This involved pre-processing audio into 30-second batches compatible with Whisper, parallelizing inference requests to Workers AI, and re-ordering out-of-order responses to ensure sequential and accurate WebVTT caption file generation.
  11. What’s new with Cloudflare Media: updates for Calls, Stream, and ImagesIntroduced Live Instant Clipping API for Cloudflare Stream, enabling viewers to instantly clip moments from ongoing streams without re-encoding. Added a pre-built upload widget for Cloudflare Images to simplify user uploads and a face cropping feature using a RetinaFace ML model for optimizing images of people at scale. Cloudflare Calls is now in open beta with transparent pricing.
  12. Cloudflare Calls: millions of cascading trees all the way downThis post announces the open beta of Cloudflare Calls, a WebRTC-based real-time audio/video application platform. It details how Cloudflare leverages its global network as a singular SFU, abstracting away the complexities of WebRTC infrastructure for developers. Key contributions include explaining the challenges of scaling WebRTC with peer-to-peer and traditional SFU models, and how Cloudflare Calls utilizes Anycast for low-latency connections, eliminates manual SFU region selection, and manages PeerConnections through a unified HTTP API for signaling and DTLS/ICE handling.
  13. Cloudflare Stream Low-Latency HLS support now in Open BetaIntroduced open beta support for Low-Latency HLS (LL-HLS) for Cloudflare Stream Live. LL-HLS extends the HLS standard to reduce glass-to-glass latency to as little as three seconds, enabling more interactive features and time-sensitive applications. The feature is available at the same pricing as standard HLS. The post details recommended broadcast settings (h264 codec, 1-second GOP size) and how to enable LL-HLS via the Cloudflare dashboard. It also mentions the ability to test LL-HLS manifests by appending '?protocol=llhls' to the manifest URL.
  14. Introducing scheduled deletion for Cloudflare StreamCloudflare Stream now supports scheduled deletion for on-demand videos and live stream recordings. This feature allows users to automatically remove videos at a specified date and time via the dashboard or API, simplifying storage management and reducing costs. For live inputs, a policy can be configured to automatically delete recordings after a set number of days.
  15. Introducing Low-Latency HLS Support for Cloudflare StreamIntroduced Low-Latency HLS (LL-HLS) support for Cloudflare Stream, reducing viewer latency from ~30 seconds to under 10 seconds in many cases. This was achieved by modifying the underlying pipeline to work with individual frames rather than whole keyframe-intervals, decoupling internal buffer duration from keyframe interval. The feature is currently in closed beta and requires specific encoder settings (H.264, constant bitrate, 2s keyframe interval, no B Frames) for optimal performance.
  16. Bringing the best live video experience to Cloudflare Stream with AV1Cloudflare Stream now supports the AV1 codec for live videos and their recordings, available in open beta. AV1 offers 46% less bandwidth than H.264. The platform uses dedicated AV1 hardware encoders for real-time encoding, enabling AV1 for live streaming and simplifying adoption for existing video libraries by encoding on-demand.
  17. Lights, Camera, Action! Business and Pro customers get bundled streaming videoThis post announces the bundling of Cloudflare Stream with Business and Pro subscriptions, providing a complimentary allocation of 100 minutes of video storage and 10,000 minutes of video delivery per month. It details the no-code upload process via drag-and-drop, automatic encoding and adaptive-bitrate streaming, and customization options for the Stream Player (poster image, start time, default text track, primary color). It also highlights additional features like dynamic thumbnail generation, multi-language captions, live streaming, and analytics, directing users to the Cloudflare Stream Docs for more information.
  18. Build real-time video and audio apps on the world’s most interconnected networkCloudflare Calls is a new product that acts as a global, regionless WebRTC server, leveraging Cloudflare's network as a 'super peer' to abstract away the complexity of real-time audio/video app infrastructure. It uses anycast for routing, scales automatically, and provides enhanced observability through a server-side view of the WebRTC Statistics API. It also offers improved privacy and security by eliminating direct peer-to-peer IP exposure and encrypting all traffic by default.
  19. WebRTC live streaming to unlimited viewers, with sub-second latencyCloudflare Stream now supports live video streaming over WebRTC with sub-second latency to unlimited concurrent viewers. This is achieved by leveraging WHIP for ingestion and WHEP for playback, utilizing Cloudflare's global network, Workers, and Durable Objects. This enables developers to integrate low-latency live streaming into their applications using open standards without vendor-specific SDKs.
  20. Stream Live is now Generally AvailableThis post announces the General Availability of Cloudflare Stream Live, marking its transition from beta to production-ready. It details the challenges of live video streaming at scale (bandwidth, encoding, ingest/delivery location, protocol evolution) and positions Stream Live as a solution that leverages Cloudflare's global network and hardware. Key features highlighted include free encoding, ingestion, and analytics, simple per-minute pricing, instant live recordings, and support for RTMPS and SRT. The post also provides a step-by-step guide for creating a live input, using the RTMPS key with broadcasting software, previewing the stream, and adding playback to websites/apps.
  21. Closed Caption support coming to Stream LiveIntroduced live caption support for Cloudflare Stream by enabling auto-detection and inclusion of embedded CEA-608 and CEA-708 captions in live streams ingested via SRT and RTMPS. The Stream Player will render these captions automatically, and custom players can be configured to display them. Support is currently for a single language during live events, with multi-language support available for on-demand versions.
  22. Stream with sub-second latency is like a magical HDMI cable to the cloudCloudflare Stream now supports video playback with sub-second latency over SRT or RTMPS at scale. This is achieved by routing video traffic within the Cloudflare network, leveraging its Anycast network and backbone for minimal latency. The platform supports dynamic distribution topologies and aims to make video delivery easy by supporting multiple protocols, including RTMPS and SRT for ingestion and delivery, with future exploration of WebRTC, QUIC, HTTP/3, and WebTransport. The service offers sub-second latency for use cases like interactive Q&A sessions, esports, and remote webinars.
  23. Bring your own ingest domain to Stream LiveIntroduced the ability for all Cloudflare Stream accounts to configure custom ingest domains, allowing customers to use their own branded domains (e.g., push.live-yoga-classes.com) for RTMPS and SRT ingestion. This feature is available at no additional cost for Stream subscribers, with up to five ingest domains per account. The implementation leverages Cloudflare Spectrum to ensure secure CNAMEing without compromising the privacy of broadcasters. Configuration involves adding the domain as a zone, CNAMEing it to live.cloudflare.com, and then adding it as a Live Ingest Domain in the Stream dashboard.
  24. Cloudflare Stream simplifies creator management for creator platformsIntroduced the 'Creator Property' for Cloudflare Stream, allowing platforms to associate uploaded videos with specific creator IDs. This is achieved by setting the 'creator' field when requesting a tokenized upload URL for direct uploads. This property can then be used to filter Stream Analytics via the Dashboard or GraphQL API, enabling platforms to query creator-specific video consumption data without maintaining external indexes.
  25. Stream now supports SRT as a drop-in replacement for RTMPIntroduced support for SRT (Secure Reliable Transport) protocol as a new ingest option for Cloudflare Stream Live and Stream Connect. This includes the ability to translate between SRT and RTMP, allowing users to leverage SRT's benefits (lower latency, better resilience) while maintaining compatibility with existing RTMP infrastructure. The implementation supports adding/removing SRT/RTMP outputs without restarting streams and scales to tens of thousands of concurrent streams.
  26. New Stream Player customizations to boost your video experienceIntroduced new customization options for the Cloudflare Stream Player: primaryColor for branding play button and seekbar, startTime for deep linking to specific video timestamps, and default language selection for localized captions. Revamped the Embed tab to allow visual configuration and instant preview of player customizations, including setting poster image timestamps directly from the player.
  27. Build your next video application on CloudflareThis post details how to build a video application using Cloudflare Stream, Access, Pages, and Workers. It demonstrates fetching video lists via the Stream API, playing videos with public or signed URLs, uploading videos using direct creator uploads and API tokens, and integrating livestreaming with Stream Live. It also covers securing the application with Cloudflare Access middleware and deploying the entire application on Cloudflare Pages.
  28. Cloudflare Images introduces AVIF, Blur and Bundle with StreamThis post introduces AVIF image format support for Cloudflare Images, leveraging the Accept header to serve AVIF or WebP/JPEG based on client capabilities. It also adds a blur functionality for image variants, enabling preview use cases and integration with signed URLs for content protection. The post details how to serve images from custom domains using Workers and announces bundled pricing for Cloudflare Images and Stream. It also mentions upcoming Images Analytics.
  29. Real-Time Communications at ScaleIntroduced WebRTC Components, a new suite of products designed to help build the next generation of real-time, interactive applications. This includes leveraging Cloudflare's global edge network to improve connectivity for existing WebRTC-based video and audio applications, enabling scaling to tens of thousands of participants, leveraging DDoS mitigation, and enforcing IP and ASN-based access policies. The platform will offer developer-first APIs for managing participants, rooms, and channels, integration with Cloudflare for Teams, broadcasting to traditional HTTP streaming clients and recording with Stream Live, ingesting from RTMP sources with Stream Connect, and embedded serverless capabilities via Cloudflare Workers.
  30. Serverless Live Streaming with Cloudflare StreamIntroduced Stream Live, an end-to-end scalable live-streaming platform. It supports RTMPS ingestion from mobile/desktop, automatically records broadcasts, and delivers them via an optimized player or HLS/DASH. Features include self-expiring tokenized links for access control (time-based, geo-fencing, IP restrictions), instant conversion of live videos to recordings (under 1 second), and global scaling by leveraging Cloudflare's network for ingest and delivery. Achieves low latency (as low as 15 seconds) and offers simple, pay-as-you-go pricing based on recorded and viewed minutes, with no hidden costs for ingest, encoding, egress, or storage. Supports multiple quality levels at no additional cost.
  31. Announcing Cloudflare TV as a ServiceThis post details the internal development of Cloudflare TV's production stack, highlighting the use of Cloudflare Stream for managing over 1,000 episodes, including automatic transcoding and Video on Demand capabilities. It also announces the upcoming integration of Stream Live to replace the current backend server's video encoding for live broadcasts, promising offloading of encoding tasks and a more efficient relay to video.js embeds.
  32. Cloudflare Images Now Available to EveryoneThis post announces the general availability of Cloudflare Images to all customers, marking a significant expansion of Cloudflare's media handling capabilities beyond video streaming. It details the core features of Cloudflare Images, including efficient storage of images and their variants, built-in access control via signed URLs, elimination of egress costs by consolidating storage, resizing, and delivery into a single product, and flexible upload methods. It also outlines the initial variant resizing options and optimized image delivery formats, with plans for future enhancements like AVIF support and analytics.
  33. Optimizing images on the webThis post introduces Cloudflare's Image Optimization Testing Tool and details how to optimize images for web performance. It explains the impact of image optimization on user experience and Core Web Vitals (LCP, CLS), and outlines techniques such as delivering appropriate dimensions using srcset/sizes or Client Hints, choosing optimal formats (AVIF, WebP), adjusting quality, and ensuring correct markup with dimensions to minimize layout shifts.
  34. Building Cloudflare Images in Rust and Cloudflare WorkersThis post details the technical implementation of Cloudflare Images, highlighting the use of Rust for reusable image processing libraries (Image Resizing, Polish) and Cloudflare Workers for edge delivery, direct uploads, and URL signing. It explains the architecture involving core services, image resizing, delivery Workers, and storage, and discusses how variants, cache purging, and URL signatures are managed. It also touches upon future enhancements like resizing hints on upload and serving images from custom domains, further solidifying the expansion of media handling capabilities beyond video streaming.
  35. How Cloudflare Images can make your life easierThis post introduces Cloudflare Images as a new service, detailing customer pain points related to image management including egress fees, complex bucket management, load times, and high maintenance. It explains how Cloudflare Images addresses these issues by offering zero egress costs, a unified storage solution, minimal engineering effort through APIs and a UI, and on-the-fly image processing for optimization and SEO benefits. This post significantly expands the scope of the 'Video Streaming with Cloudflare Stream' feature thread to encompass comprehensive media handling, specifically image management.
  36. Announcing Cloudflare Images beta to simplify your image pipelineIntroduced Cloudflare Images, a new service for storing, resizing, optimizing, and delivering images at scale. It addresses fundamental questions of image infrastructure by eliminating egress costs and the need for managing storage buckets. The service offers simple APIs for image upload and retrieval, and introduces 'Variants' for defining and securing different image sizes and access levels. It also provides intelligent delivery by automatically serving optimized image formats (e.g., WebP) at the edge.
  37. Cloudflare Stream now supports NFTsIntroduced an API to associate ERC-721 token IDs and contract addresses with Cloudflare Stream videos, enabling NFT-based ownership representation. Added a claim API that allows the owner of an NFT to take administrative control (including deletion) of the associated video on Cloudflare Stream by proving ownership via a signed message. The Stream video player will now display a link to the associated NFT contract and token.
  38. Live stream to multiple platforms with Stream ConnectIntroduced Stream Connect beta, enabling users to push RTMPS feeds to the Cloudflare edge for restreaming to multiple platforms (Facebook, YouTube, Twitch). This eliminates the upload bandwidth bottleneck for broadcasters, automatically configures optimal ingest servers by evaluating Cloudflare data center health and connection speeds to video platforms, and leverages Argo Smart Routing to improve reliability and lower latency by intelligently routing streams across the Cloudflare network.
  39. Add Watermarks to your Cloudflare Stream Video UploadsIntroduced the Watermarks API for Cloudflare Stream, enabling programmatic addition of watermarks to video uploads. This includes a new `/stream/watermarks` endpoint for creating watermark profiles (defining image URL, opacity, padding, scale, and position) and support for a `watermark` object with a `uid` during video upload. This feature is available at no additional cost.
  40. Making Video Intuitive: An ExplainerThis post provides a foundational explanation of video encoding concepts, including frame rate, resolution, and bitrate, using FFmpeg examples to illustrate the impact of these parameters on video quality and file size. It details experiments with reducing frame rate, resolution, and bitrate on the 'Big Buck Bunny' video to demonstrate the degradation of visual quality and the underlying principles of video compression.
  41. Remote Work Isn’t Just Video Conferencing: How We Built CloudflareTVThis post details the construction of CloudflareTV, an internal video application. It describes how to secure videos using signed URLs generated by Cloudflare Stream, how to tag videos using the meta field, and how to fetch video data programmatically using Cloudflare Workers. It also explains how to restrict access to the application using Cloudflare Access with Google as an identity provider and an access policy based on email domain.
  42. Live video just got more live: Introducing Concurrent Streaming AccelerationIntroduced Concurrent Streaming Acceleration, a technique to reduce live video end-to-end latency by modifying CDN caching infrastructure to allow multiple clients to access an un-cached segment simultaneously while only pulling it once from the origin. This eliminates the 'cache lock' bottleneck that previously forced clients to wait for the entire segment to be cached before delivery.
  43. Use Cloudflare Stream to build secure, reliable video appsThis post announces the general availability of Cloudflare Stream, a product designed to simplify video streaming for developers. It details the API for uploading and delivering video, the multi-bitrate encoding process, and the use of DASH and HLS manifests. The post highlights the low cost, efficient routing through Cloudflare's network, and the integrated solution approach that considers the entire user experience from developer to viewer. Common use cases like video-on-demand, gaming, eLearning, and video ads are presented.
  44. How Cloudflare StreamsThis post details the technical implementation of Cloudflare Stream, focusing on three key areas: Uploads, Encodes, and Delivery. For uploads, it highlights the use of the Tus protocol for resumable uploads of large video files. For encoding, it explains the need to encode videos into multiple formats (e.g., H.264, VP9, HEVC) to support various browser codecs and announces initial support for H.264 and MP4, with plans to add VP9 and HEVC. For delivery, it describes the use of progressive downloads (pseudo streaming) and adaptive streaming (HLS and MPEG-DASH) to preserve video quality and adapt to network conditions. It also details how Cloudflare leverages its global network and underutilized data centers to optimize delivery cost and performance by dynamically assigning IP ranges and generating manifest files that point to different data centers for video chunks. The post also introduces the Stream app for the Cloudflare Apps platform, enabling easier integration for developers.
  45. Introducing Cloudflare Stream: Fixing the Streaming Video MarketCloudflare Stream is launched, offering an integrated solution for video encoding, global delivery (CDN), and player functionality. Pricing is simplified to per-minute consumption, inclusive of all components, aligning business models with customer objectives. Compression is enabled by default. The goal is to expand video streaming adoption by removing technical and business barriers.