Stream Live: Cloudflare’s Managed Live-Video Pipeline
Cloudflare has opened the beta of Stream Live, a fully managed platform for building live-streaming applications. Instead of assembling encoders, ingest servers and delivery logic yourself, you push a single RTMPS stream to Cloudflare and it handles recording, transcoding and playback at scale. There is no cap on the number of concurrent broadcasts or viewers.
The service is built for the tools you already own. Broadcasters can go live from mobile or desktop using ffmpeg, OBS or even Zoom. On the playback side, every input gets an embed code for the built-in Stream player, and you can also deliver through your own player using HLS or DASH if you need a custom UX.
Access control and instant recordings
Viewer access is managed with self-expiring signed tokens. When issuing a token you can enforce expiration times, geo-fencing and IP restrictions. That lets you require login for a learning platform, or restrict a concert stream to a particular country per licensing agreements, without making auth logic part of the ingest path.
Recordings are generated by default. When the broadcast ends, the recording is available in under a second, so late viewers can immediately catch up on the portion they missed.
Distribution and latency
Rather than pulling video back to a single ingest region, Cloudflare software accepts the live input and delivers the output at the network edge. After ingestion, the content is moved across the Cloudflare backbone and Argo routing to viewers. In practice this means not having to provision compute instances, manage availability zones, or negotiate extra software licenses when the user base grows.
Depending on the encoder settings, the time from “live” to “on screen” can be as low as 15 seconds. That is sufficient for building out chat and Q&A features around a broadcast of a meeting, concert or sport. It does not yet support interactive uses that need sub-second delivery; Cloudflare says latency reduction is an active goal, and notes the network is already within 50 ms of 95% of the world’s population, which matters because low latency is only useful when the delivery path is reliable.
Pricing model
Stream Live is pay-as-you-go with two billed components:
- $5 per 1,000 minutes of video storage per month. Live input is recorded automatically; ingest is not billed separately.
- $1 per 1,000 minutes of video viewed.
There are no separate charges for encode, egress or compute, which often trip up in-house pipelines. Cloudflare encodes each stream into multiple quality levels at no added cost, so viewers moving between Wi-Fi and mobile connections get adaptive playback without additional fees. For high-volume deployments — thousands of concurrent broadcasters or millions of viewers — Cloudflare asks you to contact them for custom pricing.
Getting started
Stream Live works independently of any Cloudflare domain. Existing Stream subscribers open the “Live Input” tab in the Stream dashboard and create a new input.
If you don’t yet have a Cloudflare account, you can sign up directly for Stream.
