Beginning December 1, 2022, if you have a Business or Pro subscription, you will receive a complimentary allocation of Cloudflare Stream. Here’s what this means:
All Cloudflare customers with a Biz or Pro domain will be able to store up to 100 minutes of video content and deliver up to 10,000 minutes of video content each month at no additional cost
If you need additional storage or delivery beyond the complimentary allocation, you will be able to upgrade to a paid Stream subscription from the Stream Dashboard.
Cloudflare Stream simplifies storage, encoding and playback of videos. You can use the free allocation of Cloudflare Stream for various use cases, such as background/hero videos, e-commerce product videos, how-to guides and customer testimonials.
Upload videos with no code
To upload your first video Stream, simply visit the Stream Dashboard and drag-and-drop the video file:
Once you upload a video, Stream will store and encode your video. Stream automatically optimizes your video uploads by creating multiple versions of it at different quality levels. This happens behind-the-scenes and requires no extra effort from your side. The Stream Player automatically selects the optimal quality level based on your website visitor’s Internet connection using a technology called adaptive-bit rate encoding.
Your uploaded video will appear on the Dashboard:
Click on the video in the list of videos to watch a preview, change settings or to grab the embed code:
Built-in Stream Player
Stream provides an embed code that can be used to place your uploaded videos onto your website. The embed code can be found under the Embed tab:
To include the video on your website, simply copy-and-paste the embed code.
You’ll notice in the screenshot above that the Embed tab lets you customize the viewing experience. It supports the following optional properties:
Poster: The “poster image” is what appears on the video player before the user has started playing the video. By default, the poster image is set to the first frame in the video. However, you can change it by specifying another point in time or by specifying a URL to an image.
Start Time: Let’s say you have a 10-minute instructional video and your customer writes in with a question that is answered in that video at the 8-minute mark. You can use the Start Time property to have the video playback begin at the 8-minute mark, so your customer with a specific question does not need to watch 8 minutes of the video wondering “when will it answer my question?”. Instead, you can share a link with the customer that begins the video playback at the 8-minute mark.
Default Text Track: You can upload caption files for multiple languages for a given video. By default, captions are turned off. But if you want the captions to always render when the video plays, you can choose the default language from the Default Text Track dropdown.
Primary Color: You can choose your brand’s primary color and have it applied to various elements within the player, including the play button and the seek bar. Here is an example of the Stream Player with the Primary Color property configured to the Cloudflare orange:
Much, much more…
We live in a video-first world. Many Cloudflare customers already upload their videos to free video hosting services for marketing purposes. However, when you embed a video on your website that is hosted on a free video sharing service, your users often have to engage with unwelcomed ads and pixel trackers. Our hope is that by offering a free tier of Stream to Biz and Pro customers, you can use video to show off your products in a way that respects your users’ privacy and reflects your brand identity.
In addition to the features described in this announcement, Cloudflare Stream includes many more features including:
Dynamic Thumbnail Generation
Multi-language Captions
Live Streaming
Analytics
For a comprehensive list of features and how to use them, check out the Cloudflare Stream Docs.