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

Cloudflare describes the distributed architecture of Stream Live, its live video ingest and delivery pipeline built on Anycast, Spectrum, Workers, Durable Objects, and R2, and its on-the-fly encoding strategy that leverages tiered caching and request coalescing for efficiency. The post explains ingest lifecycle and state management (volatile vs. committed), playlist generation for HLS/DASH, delivery via a Worker near viewers, and the tradeoffs and benefits of encoding only what viewers request, emphasizing performance, scalability, and operational efficiency.