One upload, many destinations
Live-streaming platforms like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitch each have their own audiences and tools. A creator broadcasting to just one of them is leaving potential viewers on the table. The usual workaround—pushing the same feed to several platforms at once—works, but it burns upload bandwidth and puts the burden of finding the best ingest route on the broadcaster.
Cloudflare’s Stream Connect beta takes a different approach. Instead of sending your video to each platform yourself, you send a single RTMPS feed to the Cloudflare edge. Stream Connect then restreams that feed to every platform you’ve configured. Cloudflare announced the beta today, with general availability following later (update, 20 July 2021: Stream Connect is now available to all customers).
For the broadcaster, the protocol doesn’t change—you still push RTMPS. What changes is where you push it: once to Cloudflare, not once per destination.
Why the middleman helps
No more upload bottleneck
When you stream from a phone or laptop, your upstream connection is the weak link. Sending the same video to Twitch, YouTube, and Facebook simultaneously multiplies the load on that link. That can force lower bitrates, dropped frames, or higher latency. With Stream Connect, your device uploads one copy of the feed. Cloudflare’s network handles the fan-out to your configured destinations, so your own connection isn’t doing three times the work.
Automatic ingest selection
Platforms like Twitch publish lists of recommended ingest servers, but choosing the right one is a manual chore—and it’s worse when you’re traveling or juggling multiple platforms. Stream Connect continuously measures latency and connection health from Cloudflare’s data centers to the major video platforms, then picks the best ingest endpoints automatically. The broadcaster doesn’t need to know or care which Twitch ingest server is closest.
Argo takes the public internet out of the path
A typical direct stream travels over the public internet to each destination, where congestion can cause buffering or frame loss at any moment. With Stream Connect, the feed enters Cloudflare’s Anycast network at the point of presence closest to the broadcaster. From there, Argo Smart Routing steers the traffic over less congested paths to the third-party platforms. The result is a stream that’s less sensitive to internet hiccups between the broadcaster and the destination.
Beta details
The Stream Connect beta was invite-only and free for participants during the trial period. Pricing and developer documentation were scheduled to be published as invitations went out. The service is now open to all customers.
