Cloudflare Stream Live Cuts Viewer Latency With LL-HLS Beta

Cloudflare has announced support for Low-Latency HTTP Live Streaming (LL-HLS) in a closed beta for its Stream Live product. The new capability is designed to reduce glass-to-glass latency—the time between an event happening on the broadcaster's side and a viewer seeing it on screen—from highs of around 30 seconds to under 10 seconds in many cases, depending on encoder and player settings.

The lower latency opens up more interactive use cases for live streaming, such as Q&A sessions, chat, sports, gaming, and other time-sensitive live events where a multi-second delay between action and reaction is unacceptable.

Redesigning the Encoding Pipeline

A major technical hurdle in achieving low latency was Cloudflare's existing architecture, which relied on a pipeline with multiple buffers as long as the keyframe interval. This caused Stream Live to introduce a delay of up to five times the keyframe interval. To address this, the team simplified a portion of the pipeline to work with individual frames rather than entire keyframe-intervals, while retaining the economies of scale from their encoding approach. This decoupling of keyframe interval and internal buffer duration reduces HLS latency to a maximum of twice the keyframe interval.

Cloudflare notes that LL-HLS is an extension of HLS, and the improved performance is driven by what a user actually sees on screen, not just when a byte lands in a buffer.

Pricing and Features Remain Unchanged

Support for LL-HLS builds on Stream's existing features without altering its pricing model. There are no charges for ingest, compute (encoding), or egress. Customers pay $5 per 1,000 minutes of video stored per month and $1 per 1,000 minutes of video viewed per month.

Unlike other platforms that treat live recordings as a paid add-on and may take minutes or hours to make them available, Cloudflare Stream automatically records live segments and makes them immediately available for on-demand playback.

Stream users can leverage the built-in web player or use HLS manifests with a compatible third-party player. Stream also supports access control via signed URLs, allowing content creators to restrict viewing to specific users or time windows. Delivery is handled by Cloudflare's global network, with points of presence within 50ms of 95% of the Internet-connected population.

Beta Requirements

Cloudflare is seeking beta testers for non-production workloads. To participate, applications should be configured with:

  • H.264 video codec
  • Constant bitrate
  • Keyframe interval (GOP size) of 2 seconds
  • No B Frames
  • The Stream built-in player

Setting up a live stream remains straightforward: create a Live Input in the Cloudflare dashboard, and Stream automatically provides RTMPS and SRT endpoints for broadcasting, an HTML embed for the built-in player, and an HLS manifest for custom players. Broadcast tools like OBS can use the connection information to start streaming immediately.

Beta participants will need to make a minor adjustment to the built-in player embed code. There are no changes to Live Input configuration, the dashboard interface, the API, or existing functionality.

Following the beta period, LL-HLS will be generally available to all new and existing Stream subscriptions with no pricing changes or contract requirements.