What it is for
A live event can't be run a second time. Latency is a budget spent across capture, encode, packaging, delivery, and the player buffer, and cutting it in the wrong place costs you resilience while saving very little time. The failures that matter happen during the event, so the response to each one has to be configured in advance.
Glass-to-glass live delivery with the latency budget accounted for segment by segment, and the redundancy a fixed-time event needs: two encode paths with hot failover. It is built for broadcasts that cannot pause while someone finds a fault.
What it does
- LL-HLS and DASH low-latency profiles
- Segment-level latency budget accounting
- Dual-path encode with hot failover
- Ad-break signalling and SCTE-35 handling
- Event rehearsal and load qualification
- Live-to-VOD clipping and archive
- Coverage
- Multi-region
- Refresh
- Live
- Delivery
- Managed event, or your infrastructure
How it works
Account for the budget
We write down where every part of the latency goes, from capture to player buffer. That turns a target figure into a set of decisions, each with a known cost.
Build two paths
Encode runs twice, in separate failure domains, with a hot switch between them. If one path fails mid-event, the stream switches to the other and carries on.
Rehearse
We run the event at full load before the day, including the failover, the ad breaks, and the clipping, so problems turn up in rehearsal.
Run it and archive it
During the event we monitor the latency budget and both paths against the rehearsal baseline. Afterwards the stream becomes clipped VOD and an archive, without a second ingest.
What you get
- Low-latency live pipeline, managed by us or in your infrastructure
- Documented latency budget with the cost of each decision
- Dual-path encode with tested hot failover
- SCTE-35 ad-break signalling
- Rehearsal report and load qualification results
- Live-to-VOD clipping and archive configuration
Who it is for
- Sports rights holders and broadcasters with fixed-time events
- Platforms whose live stream runs well behind the broadcast feed
- Teams who have had a live failure with no rehearsed failover
Example projects
Example designs related to Live Edge, built on Cloudflare.
- Sub-second live with WHIP and WHEPLive auctions, Q&A and watch-alongs where a few seconds of delay is too much
- Instant clips from a live streamViewers clip the moment they just saw and share it while the event is still on
- One live feed to many platformsSend one encoder feed to your own site and to YouTube, Twitch and others at once
Discuss Live Edge
Briefings, a scoped trial, or a look at your current setup. Tell us what is breaking.
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QuestionsQuestions
Common questions about Live Edge.
DRM solutions
Three corporate use cases, each with a Widevine demo that runs in your browser and checks what your device supports.
Video projects
Example designs for video on Cloudflare, each with a sequence diagram and the platform limits that apply.
- Serverless video platformUploads, encoding, captions and signed playback with no servers to run
- FFmpeg encoding on Cloudflare ContainersYour own ladder and packaging, started by an upload, served from R2
- Sub-second live with WHIP and WHEPLive auctions, Q&A and watch-alongs where a few seconds of delay is too much
- Searchable video archiveFind the moment in hours of recordings by what was said
- Thumbnails and previews by URLHover previews, thumbnails and storyboards for a clip library, with no batch jobs
- Instant clips from a live streamViewers clip the moment they just saw and share it while the event is still on