Behind the scenes with Stream Live, Cloudflare’s live streaming service

Cloudflare's Stream Live accepts audio/video content from broadcasters and delivers it to viewers around the world in real-time through the Cloudflare network. The service leverages the distributed nature of Cloudflare's network, with ingest and delivery happening at multiple data centers worldwide. Stream Live ingests content using protocols such as RTMPS, SRT, or WHIP, which define how content is packaged and transmitted. Once ingested, content is handled by a Spectrum application that exposes listening ports to specific broadcasters, forwarding connections to an ingest service running on the same server. The ingest service uses Durable Objects to store customer configuration and broadcast state, allowing for geographically distributed broadcasts while maintaining high availability. Content is then delivered to viewers through HLS or DASH playlists, which contain segment metadata for progressive downloading. A Cloudflare Worker called delivery-worker handles all requests for Stream content, rendering playlists and performing various functions. On-the-fly encoding by OTFE (on-the-fly-encoder) service encodes segments in real-time based on viewer request formats, optimizing power and CPU usage. The service is built on top of the Cloudflare network, utilizing tiered caching and request coalescing to support multiple viewers simultaneously.

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