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Comment by TechBro8615 | Hacker News Reader

It’s an interesting experiment, albeit one that doesn’t make much sense to me from a product perspective. I guess producing the content at a loss is something Cloudflare is uniquely positioned to do. And it’s probably a good chance to dogfood some video delivery products.

Personally, I would almost always prefer a blog format over a live segment. If it is a live segment, then I’d hope I can at least watch the recording later.

I’m curious about engagement. Is anyone watching this? Does anyone seem to actually care?

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Maybe they are actually testing for a new Cloudflare service. Lot’s of public officials for example are running live covid update sessions. Companies are broadcasting general meetings, artists are having virtual live concerts.

Resliable and scalable distribution platform for live video that plugs into existing tools could be of an interest.

Yeah, I'm not sure what are they thinking... i have some calendar reminders popup from time-to-time on an interesting _broadcast_, but not once i actually sit down to watch it. Shame, as there're 4-5 programs every week i would be happy to watch on-demand

I asked about this, they’re working on making them available on demand :)

src: https://twitter.com/cloudflarehelp/status/127293910658317107...

Cloudflare already has a video ingestion, encoding and streaming service, this is very likely dogfooding of that. Also when launching that service they seemed to imply that they they generally buy bandwidth at fixed costs, so all the edges in the world where the population is currently sleeping are unsaturated. They stream the video off those edges, so really its no skin off their backs.

How does streaming video from the other side of the world make any sense? Doing some basic looking, Cloudflare TV does not seem to be coming from my nearest POP, but the next nearest one (which is also much bigger). Definitely not the other side of the world.

Video isn't particularly latency sensitive. If I had infinite resources to design a complex system I would serve the first couple of chunks from the nearest POP to get the stream started and once I had enough of a buffer I would start optimizing for serving cost.

You don't need to move it around the world (TCP can start to bite you, but most likely you are just wasting someone else's network resources) but you can definitely move it away from the nearest POP if it is getting loaded. You can even do clever things like shard by chunk ID across warm POPs so that you get better cache utilization and reduce disk load.

Because we've reached a point where the video bandwidth requirements are much lower than what most people's connections and certainly server connections provide. So I can send you the first 10 seconds of video immediately from the nearest edge within a second or two, and spend the next eight seconds bringing you the subsequent video data from whatever edge in the world is the most underutilized. You wouldn't be able to tell the difference.

It seems to me that someone told the marketing team to burn money in a creative way. And they did.

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