Cloudflare Bets on Live TV to Replace the Tech Conference
Cloudflare is launching a 24x7 live television broadcast, streamed globally over its own network. The first program goes live at 12:00pm Pacific (1900 UTC) on Monday, June 8, when CEO Matthew Prince sits down with Chris Young, former CEO of McAfee and a veteran of Cyveillance, AOL, RSA, VMWare, Cisco, and Intel. The pre-broadcast station and full schedule are available now at cloudflare.tv.
The obvious question: why does an infrastructure company need a television network? The answer, according to Prince, is that the shared experience of linear TV — think TechTV's "Call for Help" or "3-2-1 Contact" — has been partially displaced by the tech conference circuit.
What Conferences Get Right (and Wrong)
Prince identifies four reasons people keep attending events like RSA and CES, ranked from least to most important:
- Keynotes from interesting people
- Product and feature demos
- Conversations with technical experts
- Social interaction with peers
But the costs are real: time away from family, scarce hotels, bad food, and the general cattle-herding of large venues. The pandemic, however, has taken the option of attending off the table entirely. Cloudflare began looking for a way to reproduce the upside of conferences without the downside — a project that started with an experiment in how the company itself operates.
An Organizational Experiment First
Cloudflare's offices in Asia and its hardware supply chain in the region meant the company felt the virus's impact early. Leadership adjusted travel and work policies in those offices and then made a round of calls to companies in affected regions, asking what was working when everyone was remote.
The most consistent answer: empower more team members to run experiments with new ways of reaching customers. One cosmetics company told Cloudflare that its sales team's experiments were so successful that it planned to abandon in-person events permanently. Prince took that lesson to Jake Anderson, head of marketing, and asked him to open up similar experimentation across sales and marketing.
Anderson pushed back. Hundreds of independent experiments, he argued, could produce chaos — one person's "good idea" might be mass emailing everyone. The compromise was a structure that let people try zany ideas while containing the blast radius. That framework became Cloudflare TV, a model Prince likens to the early days of MTV: an unproven format, hosts given latitude to try things, and a community brought together by the process.
A Channel Lineup of Cloudflare's Own
Cloudflare TV's programming mixes recurring shows with one-off specials, almost all of it live and interactive. Scheduled regulars include:
- Prince's interview series with fellow entrepreneurs and business leaders
- "Yes We Can" hosted by COO Michelle Zatlyn, spotlighting women entrepreneurs
- "This Week in Net" with CTO John Graham-Cumming, analyzing traffic patterns Cloudflare sees across its network
- Nick Sullivan's fireside chats with computer science researchers covering cryptography, AI, and databases
- "Online Team Trivia" hosted by Solutions Engineering's Chris Scharff
- "Cooking with Cloudflare" pairing technical and edible recipes from sales's Chaat Butsunturn and crypto team's Watson Ladd
- "Silicon Valley Squares", partnerships lead Dan Hollinger's take on the old game show
Special programming in the launch window includes a conversation with the organizers of the COVID-19 response effort Mask a Hero NY, a look at the privacy design of Pwned Passwords with Junade Ali, and a discussion of dark patterns and manipulative software led by design team member Bethany Sonefeld.
A Delayed Launch With a Purpose
The launch was originally scheduled for the previous week. Cloudflare pushed it back in response to the violence targeting Black communities in the United States. The delay was used productively: the team added programming highlighting diversity, including sessions led by Cloudflare's Black community group Afroflare on career paths and experiences, "Spotlight on Latino Excellence," and "Everyone at the Table," which addresses current topics from multiple perspectives.
"We've always believed that diverse teams with people who have different perspectives are more likely to find the best and most creative solutions to fulfill our mission of helping build a better Internet," Prince writes. Cloudflare TV, he says, is one forum for showcasing professionals from underrepresented communities in tech, both at Cloudflare and at other organizations.
Live, Interactive, and Low on Polish
Much of the content will be live to allow hosts to answer audience questions in real time. Viewers will hear directly from the product managers and engineers building Cloudflare. Prince also expects rough patches — no one on the team has produced television before, and early MTV regularly fell to a blank screen. The bar, he jokes, is low enough that "Jersey Shore" counts as the network's greatest success.
The bet is that technical audiences will stick around for the same reasons they filed into conference halls: demos, expert conversation, and peer contact, minus the airfare. If it works, Prince says, maybe none of us will ever need to attend RSA again.
The full Cloudflare TV guide is available at cloudflare.tv/schedule.
