Video is responsible for upwards of 70 percent of all internet traffic (not user traffic, of course, but rather the data that flows through the "pipes" of the Web).
It's expensive not only to develop video but make sure that's it's delivered in an efficient way to consumers. And there's big profits for anyone that can develop a "better' way to do it.
Cloudflare launched a video delivery service dubbed Stream this week that some experts are suggesting could be the video solution many brands have been looking for, and in time it could result in fewer views on platforms such as YouTube and Vimeo.
Most companies today either host their content on an outside platform such as YouTube or set up their own dedicated streaming platform/system (which can be cumbersome to manage and in some cases quite expensive to establish). The self-streaming option has in the past required separately paying for an encoding service, a media player and a CDN, which are usually each billed in a different way.
Stream, however, hopes to simplify this by bundling everything together (which it is well suited to do because CloudFlare is in fact a content delivery network) based on the amount of video content a company's users consume (as measured in viewing time) That will likely make it very appealing to larger brands who currently use video for a variety of purposes - from training webinars to product walk-throughs for sales and marketing.
The company introduced Stream soon after introducing an "Unmetered Mitigation" program that offers protection against distributed denial-of-service attacks without any service limits.
