

In addition to a direct link, Cloudflare also provides the video embed code as well as customizable options for the unbranded player. The video settings menu has everything you need to display the video. Overall, I’m very happy with Cloudflare Stream and its streamlined set of features. After that, I enabled the feature and my credit card was immediately charged for $5 – very simple.

To enable Cloudflare Stream, all I had to do was click on the Stream icon in the Cloudflare dashboard. Since there isn’t a lot of content about Cloudflare Stream on the Internet, I thought it would be good to share my initial experience with it. With the above in mind, I chose to go with Cloudflare Stream.

I don’t want to monetize this video with ads, so is there any advantage to hosting it on YouTube?.It’s probably better to use a solution that doesn’t display the view count because a low view count may result in negative biases and reflect poorly on my brand. It’s not really a video I want to spend time promoting heavily, so I don’t think it’ll end up getting too many views. The target audience of this video is “people who missed the webinar”.Since I primarily use YouTube for fully-produced videos that have been edited, do I want to upload this relatively raw webinar video to YouTube?.To make it even simpler, here are the questions and thoughts that went through my head before I decided to go with Cloudflare Stream for my webinar video. On the other hand, if your goal is to present an unbranded video experience for your paid course, then a solution like Cloudflare Stream is much better. For example, if your goal is for your video to be found directly in Google Search, YouTube is the best option. Now that we’ve discussed the differences between Youtube and Cloudflare Stream. The idea here is that Cloudflare Stream provides the video hosting only, and your app or website should handle features for end-user interactivity. For example, Cloudflare Stream doesn’t give you an option to tag videos for public filtering. However, it’s important to realize this is only the case because Cloudflare Stream is intended to be an infrastructure-level product, while YouTube is an actual mainstream consumer-oriented product. Nice and simple.Ĭompared to YouTube’s relatively bloated UX, Cloudflare Stream’s upload interface is refreshingly simple.
#Cloudflare stream player plus#
You pay Cloudflare, and they host your videos – $5/1,000 minutes of video in storage plus $1/1,000 minutes of video watched.Ĭloudflare Stream's video upload interface. The economics of it are easy to grasp because Cloudflare Stream is a paid service. Cloudflare Stream is actually a pure and simple video hosting platform. Philosophically speaking, Cloudflare Stream is the opposite of YouTube. If your primary purpose for uploading videos is appearing in search results and monetizing via ads, then YouTube is definitely video hosting platform to choose. Entire careers have been built off YouTube’s search engine. Without getting into too many details, because this isn’t a “how to be a YouTuber” post, the privilege of appearing in YouTube search results is super valuable.
#Cloudflare stream player how to#
On YouTube, your videos act as delivery trucks for Google to ship ads to eyeballs around the world – that’s why it’s “free”.Įven though thinking of YouTube in this manner feels dystopian, I don’t think it’s inherently negative if you are aware of how to take advantage of YouTube. It’s a complex search engine and ad-matching platform that uses video as its primary delivery channel. In 2020, YouTube isn’t a simple video hosting service anymore. To answer this question, you have to understand two important things – the purpose of each platform and your goal. With that out of the way, let’s talk about why you would want to use Cloudflare Stream over YouTube, or vice-versa. The two platforms are fundamentally different, so I don’t think they’re worth comparing at all. Cloudflare Stream is arguably more of a whitelabel video infrastructure product, while YouTube’s solution is the farthest away from “whitelabel” as you can get. In this post, I’ll go over the two platforms, and share why I decided to use Cloudflare Stream over YouTube.Įven though a lot of people compare Cloudflare Stream and YouTube, I don’t think they should necessarily be compared at all. Eventually, I decided to upload it to Cloudflare Stream instead. My initial thought was to upload the video to YouTube and call it a day. After the webinar, I wanted to make the recording available for people to watch in case they missed the live event. I recently hosted a live webinar on how to host an online concert with Zoom and MainStage.
