[tracker1]

Was curious about Cloudflare's pricing as a comparison... it looks like $1 per 1000 minutes viewed, which means a 10 minute video will cost #1 to have 100 views... That just seems prohibitively expensive to me, it's pretty much 100% of the lower end of video advertising just for delivery fees.

I know there are competing and cheaper services, but it still seems to be a big burden to get into. I've been trying to use Rumble a bit more, as well as appreciate the entry of Pepperbox, Floatplane and others. It's still a bit of a mess and none of them match the 10' experience of YouTube on Android TV, but it's getting better.

[simonw]

$1/1,000 minutes is the pricing for Cloudflare's "Cloudflare Stream" product, which is specifically about live video streaming: https://developers.cloudflare.com/stream/pricing/

If you're not streaming live I believe you can serve video content out of R2 instead, which still somehow only charges for storage but offers completely free outbound bandwidth (egress).

[JimDabell]

Cloudflare Stream isn’t just for live-streaming, it’s for generic video hosting too. It does transcoding, adaptive bitrate, HLS, etc. It’s terrible and you shouldn’t use it, but it does a lot more than just serve static video files like R2.

[jadbox]

Just to add, you should never serve video straight from R2 unless you pre-render all your videos for all major devices. Otherwise you get very, very subpar device buffering performance. Generally use R2 as a cache layer over your stream processor (CF Stream).

[tracker1]

I may be misremembering, but I thought R2 terms disallowed video streaming content... I'm unable to find any references to this now, though I didn't do an exhaustive search.

[simonw]

Looks like they dropped that restriction in May 2023: https://blog.cloudflare.com/updated-tos/

> [...] Finally, we made it clear that customers can serve video and other large files using the CDN so long as that content is hosted by a Cloudflare service like Stream, Images, or R2.