I understand how this benefits Cloudflare, but I don't really see why I'd tune in. Seems like a mix of Cloudflare ads and "technical" content that is barely technical. More vague TED Talk-style philosophy.
If I had to describe who I felt was the target demographic, I'd name middle managers who work in tech but don't actually know much tech.
I mean they have someone from McAfee talking about security, and title it "Cyber: The New Frontier," it is so cringy, and they seemingly don't realize that.
I obviously don't speak for others, so maybe I am wrong and there is a lot of people who want to watch video content showcasing corporate America's biggest tech illiterate "tech" luminaries, spouting their outmoded concepts of what the future will be like from the viewpoint of ten years behind the cutting edge.
that's why it's underwhelming. its best case scenario is a marketing channel, not a revolutionary new distribution channel, which is what i would have expected from a company like cloudflare.
Perhaps the same people who watched TechTV back when—teens with aspirations of becoming technical people, looking for an approachable semi-educational product, that can be justified/excused as being an entertainment product.
This should be the submitted link. I was taken to a Live Broadcast and had no idea what it was and had to come back to the comments here to understand.
Same here. I dove into comments to figure out what I was looking at. I sort of figured it out by poking around but was looking for explanative context.
Hi Matthew. Is there a way to connect with the team behind cloudflare.tv? We're building something similar (netflix original for tech conferences and meetups) and would be happy to talk with like-minded people.
Yeah. I think I could get into something like this that I can have playing in the background that I may or may not be giving my full attention to but that is technical enough so that I stay focused and in a learning/working mood.
Content is king and the content for this channel is poorly advertised. If you are launching a video channel, there shouldn't be 1000 words before you mention what the content is. Instead of focusing on describing why you built it, focus on telling people why they should tune in.
Seems like a useful service, but there is something quite ironic about having a video titled "The Risks of a Consolidating Internet" [1] hosted by Cloudflare.
I'd argue CDN services are our best defense against centralization like AWS and GCP. Cloudflare makes it possible for me to host something out of my house without getting taken down by a mild amount of attention.
Outside of DoS'ing (which is admittedly Cloudflare's wheelhouse, but a rare concern if you aren't posting anything controversial or in a highly competitive space), you can host a site on a $5/month VPS and very trivially withstand being the top post on HN, making Reddit r/all, etc. Not even 10% CPU utilization at peak. And that's without even going to the extreme of making your site static.
Ah, but my example was far more decentralized than a VPS provider: I like being able to run something safely from my own house.
(Probably the only issue I currently hit doing this is that my ISP forbids me to use well-known ports, and Cloudflare will neither provide free CDN on a non-standard port, nor allow me to do any sort of redirecting to another port using their free service.)
This is really interesting and I hope it's a success. It seems like it's intended to be 80% useful and 20% tongue-in-cheek joke.
I'm skeptical that viewers will prefer this live scheduled format rather than simply posting all the videos to be viewed on-demand. Don't get me wrong, I love the idea of this anachronism (and especially their 80s-era channel ID logo to go along with it) but personally I prefer to consume videos from tech conferences on-demand. [1]
It looks like they are also posting the videos for on-demand viewing in the Best-Of section, so maybe the live scheduled format is just a delightful gimmick.
Why is it one cannot still register a new domain using Cloudflare? As someone who worked at a registrar before and managed ICANN compliance and registry connections, this isn’t a hard problem at all.
As a long time user, customer and promoter, this is puzzling to me to see change in direction and lack of product focus on what brought initial interest (DNS) to Cloudflare in the tech world first with the VPN stuff and now this TV stuff.
I think 'live' television serves as an effective master clock for synchronizing shared experiences. I would expect that it's especially effective when the community of people who share a common interest is large enough that peer to peer election of that kind of timing authority would be infeasible without for-purpose technical infrastructure that either currently doesn't exist, or is so niche that the results are equivalent.
Synchronized experience seems to enable some pretty powerful community interactions around discussion and participation that just don't seem to coalesce into a critical mass when everyone experiences (and then comments and participates) asynchronously.
If you assume in advance that the same number of people will either tune in live or watch a stream non-synchronized, you may have a point. The problem is, once you account for the liveness also making it so fewer people tune in, it's not clear to me it's a win.
I haven't been beholden to a TV schedule in... ummm... about seventeen years, I think? 2003 sounds about right for my first TiVo. (I was fresh out of college and still affected by the bubble burst, I had to wait for them to come down in price quite a bit.) The only thing I watch live are the occasional sports program and SpaceX launches. Having an actual schedule certainly shoots my personal interest to zippo in this particular product.
If I can go back and watch things, which is not at the moment clear to me, then there's at least a possibility that I would become interested enough in some particular thing to tune in live. But if live viewing is the only option, you're never going to get my attention.
Live video survives in two situations: when you need to see the outcome as it happens (e.g. sports) and when the primary draw is individuals and interacting with them (e.g. streamers).
I listen to a lot of talk radio (or otherwise out of leftfield radio) and a big part of the appeal is I never know exactly what I'm going to experience. I watch a lot of YouTube, etc, as well but it's a different self-curated experience where I'm choosing in advance, whereas tuning into a live radio station means I'm going to hear something I'm not expecting even if I don't like it.
Can Cloudflare put enough varied programming to make their "TV" channel similarly surprising if you tune in at random? Hard to say, but it would be neat if they managed to pull it off.
at first i was very excited just hearing "cloudflare TV", but it doesn't look like this is what i was expecting.
i don't really get the point of this. it's just another live conference broadcasting platform? why would people use this instead of just broadcasting on YouTube? Maybe i'm missing something but feels like just another marketing scheme that came from someone saying "hey this coronavirus is supposed to be the fad of the day for video startups, we should do something too".
the 24/7 aspect is cool and it is this point I was excited about. I thought they would do something different, instead of building a service dedicated to a fad which is probably about to expire.
p.s.
The "online conference" angle is not a good idea. Those who say "all tech conferences will die after coronavirus" have probably never been to tech conferences. Most people go to tech conferences not to watch speeches but to network in person. And there's a big difference between networking in person and doing it online in a public place. This problem may be solved in the future, but not through a live video platform, but probably through an AR or a VR platform.
I was not expecting anything that has to do with coronavirus, and I was expecting something that takes advantage of the strengths of cloudflare the company that no one else has.
As I said, the 24/7 idea has huge potential and I think cloudflare is well positioned to do something in this arena.
Let's see how it evolves. As I wrote in the blog post, this is fundamentally a medium to allow us to experiment with new things and see what resonates.
I was expecting a video streaming CDN so anyone could build a Youtube/Twitch competitor without having to deal with storing, transcoding and (live)streaming video. I vaguely remember AWS offering something like this. Not sure how much money there is in this market but definitely sounds like a great product fit for someone like Cloudflare.
I think one of the interesting things that could come out of this is making it easier for universities (we're talking covid related problems) to stream/record their classes and make O(ish)CW a more accessible thing. Essentially each university has their own YouTube. Then the university could have more control over who has access to what. For example, you can only access lectures to classes you're enrolled in if the uni wants more control.
I think this is one of those problems where you never know how someone is going to use tools until you get your hands on them. I used to work for an engineering firm and when we bought our first 3D printer it was a toy. Then we started to realize that it could build tools that we needed on the fly and soon we had a dozen and they were always printing something. We didn't know how to use it until we had it.
> I was expecting a video streaming CDN so anyone could build a Youtube/Twitch competitor without having to deal with storing, transcoding and (live)streaming video. I vaguely remember AWS offering something like this. Not sure how much money there is in this market but definitely sounds like a great product fit for someone like Cloudflare.
AWS offers the building blocks for this sort of thing via Elemental Media.
MediaConvert will transcode videos to various formats (MP4, HLS, MPEG Dash, etc).
MediaLive does on the fly transcoding for live streams, allows you to select various destinations (if you have a stream key for YouTube, for instance).
MediaPackage is commonly a destination for MediaLive and will act as an origination for live viewing (ideally with a CloudFront distribution in front of it). It also allows for easily converting the HLS to various outputs provided a timestamp (no frame specific clipping which is annoying); MediaConvert doesn't support HLS as input yet -- although you can do it.
MediaStore is basically a low-latency S3 for storage.
MediaTailor allows for stitching in ads.
So you still have to deal with transcoding, storage, etc. Azure has their own media services and Google uses (or bought?) Anvato. I think their service offerings are all pretty similar, but I could be wrong. Actually looking at Anvato, it looks like they provide a couple additional services.
Note: I don't work for AWS, but work for a video platform and we use AWS exclusively.
Not parent, but I thought it were a TV stream that filmed Cloudflare teams solving problems. Similar to the documentary[1] "Aardvark'd: 12 Weeks with Geeks" where they show the life of interns developing an actual product at Fog Creek, the first paying customer, bug fixes, etc.
I appreciated that one, as I did "Code Rush"[3], an embedded documentary following people at Netscape in 1998, even shows the moment Jamie Zawinski bringing the source code and uploading it, or moments where they needed Apple to greenlight using proprietary code, trying to reach Steve Jobs, and ending up implementing it.
Another one I liked was "Downloaded", a documentary about Napster with the main people (Sean Fanning, Sean Parker, Ron Conway, etc.)[4]
PS: Since you're here, I was unable to log to my CloudFlare account for more than a week, reset my password an everything, but always couldn't log in until a couple of days ago. I would have wanted to see a video on the background of the issue and how it was resolved : )
"Join Cloudflare CTO John Graham-Cumming as he interviews Cloudflare engineers and they discuss a 'war story' of a problem that needed to be solved — and how they did it."
John is based in Lisbon, so it’s scheduled for his work hours. The live version, which will allow for the audience to interact and ask questions, will be during that time. I’d imagine many of those sessions will make it into our Best Of repository or be played in a recorded version at different times during the week.
Glad to see I'm not the
only one actually scratching my head over time zones. It's a genius move to auto display times in the local user's zone but would be super helpful to state that fact somewhere otherwise I'm going to shrug and assume they're probably PDT or EDT and start doing mental arithmetic in my head while worrying I might have got the daylight savings wrong at either end. Bonus points for telling me what time zone you think I'm in... I have worked for companies that proxy all traffic through a different country, leading to not only a ton of dutch-language banner ads but timezone confusion to boot.
I've asked teams in the US offices to volunteer people to come on the show. I imagine that once we get through the first week of this we'll add another Story Time slot so I can talk to people in California easily.
I dont understand the negativity. Looking forward to seeing your channel and your format. Maybe it will work maybe not. Great initiative. I'm from the industry, and people I work with were excited about the news.
Responses here in this thread remind me of /r/linux culture. Strange, it's a HN I haven't seen.
I think that this has awesome potential. I've asked them if they're open to individuals or groups producing a show and getting an hour on their schedule.
got excited that someone was maybe finally going to fix all the stupid stuttering, broken stream, lagged to hell home webcams that the billion dollar newsmedia still hasn't solved after four months because everyone insists on using wireless everything stacking the latency
Call me cynical, but I think they're choosing not to fix some stuff on purpose. If they fixed it, their news personalities would look less "in the trenches". If the video has flaws similar to what viewers themselves experience when they try to make Zoom work, then it helps the news media cultivate a relatable "we're all in this together" feeling.
It has become its own cinematography / production style just like the shaky cam style is used to make documentaries feel more authentic or action movies more chaotic.
Seems like a proof of concept of what some future feature of https://www.cloudflare.com/products/cloudflare-stream/ might be able to provide? I'm a little confused as to whether that product as-is provides the ability to stream live, but their blog mentions cloudflare.tv being live multiple times. If so, this is a cool proof of concept of the live capabilities!
Perhaps im missing something, but the vision seems to be: imagine putting conference recording on youtube, but with a less convinent technical platform and content that's not interesting/marketing BS.
Seeing a lot of dislike in the comments here. I think its a neat idea and am going to give it a shot. It might be just what I was looking for tech related background noise to throw on the TV while I'm working.
I'm a generally technical person and I'm simply flat out uninterested in video content - the stuff that will be on this sounds broadly interesting to me but I'd rather read it in article format.
I understand video "performs" well in a lot of contexts (and thus is of particular interest to marketing people) but I am always surprised when content targeted broadly towards the technical community is done in a video-first manner. I know a few other people that feel the same, but I can only assume that Cloudflare have done some research on this and figured out that we're in the minority, and there is enough of a technical audience that would prefer to watch this kind of stuff than read it.
I know it's a lot of effort (although maybe automated transcription tools have simplified this?) but it would be awesome if text transcripts were made available of some of this content for the weirdos like me out there :)
That’s an “it depends” for me. I do always want the transcript, but let’s appreciate that a competent lecturer brings a topic to life. You don’t have to be Richard Feynman, but you do have to reveal and conceptualise at a pace an informed and inquisitive brain latches onto.
Most video content is not at this level; it’s often either glibly oversimplified (content marketing), bogged down in minutiae (how-to guides), or buried under irrelevancies (what’s up guys).
There is something I’d often prefer to consume as a AV recording, and that is interviews/panel discussion. The nuances of articulation, even body language may be informative. Compare and contrast the transcript with the video at https://www.erlang-solutions.com/blog/let-s-talkconcurrency-... for example.
A good lecture is a good lecture but that is subjective because it depends on the level of knowledge each listener has. Whereas if I am reading I can easily skip the parts that seem too elementary to me, and read many times the paragraphs that seem difficult.
A live lecture is better than video lecture because you can ask questions.
I'm a dev and enjoy my articles too, but I'd say I perform better with videos in some domains. The first one to come to mind if mechanic work. If I want to learn how to change a mass inflow sensor, it's way easier to watch the job be performed than to read a description, even with pictures.
This is a good point, I think youtube has the potential to bring back DIY repair because its much easier to watch someone do and describe each step of a task than it is to decipher a service manual. Our language is severely deficient in ability to precisely describe physical, tactile, geometrical relationships of small parts and manual tasks.
Yeah, it really does. There's also a lot of nuance in repairing something and I think most people gloss over things they've learned over the years. They forget all the details when writing out how to do something but the video preserves it. You see tricks they don't even realize they're doing.
I think ifixit.com does a pretty good job for all the electronics (okay, mostly laptops) that I've repaired so far.
> I think youtube has the potential to bring back DIY repair
This might depend on who you hang out with. I'm a tradesperson in the steel fabrication and construction industry, and I think a lot of people in this area have a propensity to want to fix and / or build pretty much everything themselves. From this perspective, with YouTube and online written guides, DIY repair is stronger than ever.
> I think youtube has the potential to bring back DIY repair because its much easier to watch someone do and describe each step of a task than it is to decipher a service manual.
I recently tried to DIY repair a HP 12A toner cartridge. The Youtube videos in the DIY space are a wild mixture of shoddy camera work (bad quality cameras, bad lighting), language issues (I don't speak Russian nor Hindi) and, honestly, bad quality - there is one specific step involving a specialized tool that can be improvised by a screwdriver and a hammer, but all videos I found it simply went over this crucial step in a second without showing or explaining anything. And this is the case for many DIY videos.
A manufacturer-produced service manual or an iFixit guide however? Crystal clear photos that can be zoomed in, legible English (or at least you can copy and paste stuff to Google Translate!), links to "where to buy spare parts"...
Once you understand the basics a high quality factory service manual is tough to beat. There’s plenty of low quality FSMs though, and most aftermarket repair manuals are awful. Videos can be helpful for learning fundamentals, but when I’m stuck on a specific problem not covered by the FSM, finding a hint or workaround happens fastest by searching forums rather than scrubbing through YouTube videos.
Not sure how to describe it but I cannot envision things at all while reading technical instructions. I own a few Haynes manuals and they do nothing for me no matter how many times I read them. I have a very visual memory. I managed to add a lift, change my CV shafts, lower control arms and a couple of other linkages by watching youtube. After doing it once, I can replay it from memory but that's not something a book can give me.
You really need a service manual from the engineering team who built the vehicle. Haynes and Chilton are remnants from an earlier time, before normal people could obtain real factory service manuals. You’re definitely better off with YouTube than an aftermarket manual, but that’s not a high bar.
To be fair, learning many mechanical tasks for the first time is really a combination of fundamentals and application specific details (this can apply to most fields outside your expertise). As you mentioned, you can repeat the same task again mostly from memory. You could then extrapolate that knowledge to a different vehicle by referencing the application specific details in a quality service manual.
Videos are helpful because you lack the fundamentals, and they can be great for that.
Yeah, that's actually what I said in an earlier comment. I said a lot of people who instruct forgot that certain techniques they do are actually part of the process but it's so automatic to them they gloss over it.
Agreed with you that I rely on videos less and less as I go. But I just kind of tinker with stuff until I figure it out.
I've noticed certain communities that live on the edge of tech-savvy do this a lot. In particular emulator and jailbreak communities for video game consoles refuse to keep up-to-date text guides on things. Everything is done on YouTube which is such a terrible format when you need to follow 30-step lists and pause to click on many links throughout the process to download software, firmware and exploits.
I'm actually surprised they don't introduce unskippable ads into articles to let content producers monetize their articles. Rather than the static ads and paywalls you can have the intro paragraph visible and then a "watch to unlock article" ad. Just like youtube with their 10min requirement, Medium can make requirements like the article needs to be more than 1000 words for 2 ads or something like that. Granted, this would lead to a lot of useless fluff just like SEO has produced and pushing the meat of the content to the very end to get people through the ads. However this happens with video yet it's still popular.
iOS does not allow "real" alternative web browsers with their own rendering and JavaScript engines, so Firefox on iOS is forced to being little more than rebranded Safari.
I use youtube.com (desktop version) in Mobile Safari and get adblocking without jailbreak.
I prefer the desktop website because it lets me watch the videos in better quality than the mobile website. m.youtube.com seems to limit the maximum bitrate and/or resolution of the videos. Did anyone else notice that?
See, I think people will tolerate ad breaks in video much more than e.g. full page takeovers in the middle of reading. They're used to it from cable TV, and there's the option to skip it, and an indication how long it is. And it's consistent because of Youtube's dominating position in the video market, unlike websites where every one would have a different 'takeover' format.
YouTube for tech articles, circa late-1990s, was ZDTV / TechTV.
A format that seems to work well with non-article is {topical content} + {multiple knowledgeable hosts} + {free form talk format with some segments}.
Early-MTV, the Screen Savers, and Car Talk were all essentially this format.
Good background noise to have playing while working. And the host-host, informal interaction makes it playable for longer than a pure just-the-facts source.
Yes, but not as much I suspect. Blogs with some ads were the thing, but most people in tech will have an ad blocker or ad blindness, so that's not very effective.
Some people will write a book about a subject, but I suspect that's hit and miss as well.
Honestly, a hard to follow YouTube video is better than digging through hundreds of pages of forum posts in attempts to find the right one. Of course clear, concise, and findable documentation is always better, but at least if someone is doing it on youtube there is demonstrable evidence that the process functioned once.
This right here is why Youtube is my first choice. I've had too many run-ins with bad documentation and some of them are just about nightmare-inducing. Youtube has an awesome advantage that I can see the whole process (which sometimes includes minor things like using specific flags or config changes), I can see that it worked, and I can create my own documentation based on the success/failure of following that guide.
I suppose that this makes some important words they say hard to search for, and thus hard to automatically detect and file a DMCA or copyright infringement note.
So it could be some security via format obscurity.
Especially jailbreak for consoles do have youtube tutorials, but its advised against as those are usually done by amateurs and outdated as soon as they hit.
I think it has more to do with how close to the topic you are researching you already are.
I had to fix the motor of my vacuum, for that I preferred a youtube tutorial because I want to see someone do the things I an about to do.
If on the other hand I am trying to do something in Blender I usually prefer a text tutorial to get the exact bit of information I am looking for.
Compare it to conventional teaching. You usually don't throw pupils a book with all the knowledge the could need once they can read and call it a day,but you try to ahow them how things are done.
I don't think it is just how close you are, but what you are doing. When doing engineering projects I still like to see what someone is doing because there tends to be things that they do that aren't discussed and change how things work. You also can learn neat little tricks this way too.
But code, I generally like reading because most of it is abstract and in your head anyways. So I think the best media depends on what you're doing and what type of learner you are.
I'll add that sometimes I read a dozen articles and just don't get it. Then I watch an OCW and everything just clicks. The reverse also happens. Sometimes you just need a different format and/or a different voice. More options only helps.
Ironically (given how anti-video-tutorial I generally am), I've learned to appreciate Blender-related videos. Not for everything, but for the things in which the alternative would be a lot of screenshots glued together with a bit of text. Some things are really best seen being done directly.
I think it has to do with how much tacit information is embedded in your activity. Blender or vacuum motor repair videos? Yes please, because the problem domain is such that I actually need to see all the things that happen in the background of the main activity, just to reassure myself I'm on the right track. Coding? God no, typing text into computer is a very constrained activity and you gain nothing by showing it on video vs. just making an article.
Why do you expect better docs from free projects? You could certainly try to be the change you want to see, but you'll find it is not easy to create comprehensive documentation for these projects, and then dedicate yourself to keeping them up to date.
That's fair actually. I should appreciate that these people are all doing this on their spare time. I had considered updating a GH repo with what I learned about the Switch Android install process but was quite exhausted after spending the full day finding and implementing the up to date YouTube guide.
I'm sure that's the case for many people. There's also a much broader audience of people who want to do these jailbreaks than programmers who are used to reading documentation. I imagine videos are drastically more accessible for them.
The worst is when you do write up docs, there are links to the docs, but then people ask questions answered in the docs, and then fail to even really attempt to read the docs after you tell them it's in the docs.
Often people want a quick fix designed specifically for them, and do not want to read even a few pages of docs.
Yeah there's definitely a lot of entitlement from people in open source/volunteer projects. I will just say that as programmers we're far better equipped to handle the frustration of errors and have the patience to solve problems on our own. These things do often get out of hand though as I've seen in many GitHub issues.
On the contrary, most of the emulation community looks down on YouTube videos as an out-of-date source of incorrect information contrary to best practices.
I think you'd be surprised at the wide availability of written information and guides for emulation.
To be clear, I should have specified this was _only_ the case with cemu which is much more experimental and likely to need more obscurity from Nintendo than others.
Other emulators, dolphin in particular, are fantastic in this regard.
I’m pretty much in agreement with everything you said, but all I can think about is how even the worst video is almost certainly better than someone’s slideshow from a technical talk shared online with no transcript or other context. I’ve seen these shared quite frequently from tech conferences, and I fail to see how anyone gets any value from those things.
Why for the last 10 years we’ve invested so much in https://blog.cloudflare.com. I’d think of this as supplementing that, and allowing you to interact live with many of the blog’s authors, rather than replacing it.
Thanks for the reply - I have been subscribed to the Cloudflare blog for years and really enjoy reading many of the in-depth technical articles that are provided by the team. I have shared many of them both internally in my workplace and on a few other channels.
I think I have interacted with authors on the blog a few times via comments - for me doing it "asynchronously" is probably going to be more applicable to me anyway.
I'll definitely check it out as time permits but just wanted to mention my preferences are definitely more on the written side :) Thanks for reading & again for your response.
I'm also in the camp of people who almost always prefer written text for consuming information, especially technical ones. If a video has transcripts, often I read that instead of watching, since I can skim, skip, find the best parts easier.
The Cloudflare blog has excellent content, I've been a long-time fan and have shared links to it with colleagues.
All that said, I feel that Cloudflare TV is a brilliant concept. The fact that such a fresh creative idea was embraced and implemented, I can see how the company culture encourages and supports collaborative innovation.
Looking at the listing of shows, I remembered my teenage years, like how I enjoyed the variety of creative talents on early MTV. I'm excited to catch some of the Cloudflare shows live - I'll probably use the picture-in-picture feature of the browser, to have a permanent window on a corner of my screen, with the live streams.
> deaf or hard-of-hearing people should be able to enjoy the programs
This is really important. I have moderate hearing loss but can hear 'okay' with a hearing aid. I place where I worked had a lot of mandatory training that involved video presentations. They introduced one new video and I realised that there was one bit where some important info (it was needed to pass the post video test) was only presented in spoken form, with no transcript or captions. I could follow it but a person with profound hearing loss would have struggled. Because I am sensitised to accessibility issues I decided to make a fuss about this.
In a superb piece of irony, the subject of the training video was actually diversity issues in the workplace. I therefore contacted the training department saying "Did you know that your diversity training discriminates against deaf people?" To give them credit, they said 'oops our bad' and quickly added captions.
That sounds very frustrating. More frustrating than me explaining to senior mgmt why we need to spend money on a11y.
Your example is a great one, but aside from audio and visual problems, a11y covers things like cognitive deficits, which, for some, make watching and learning from videos difficult.
> I decided to make a fuss about this.
Good on you, more people need to be making a fuss about this.
I actually wrote Chris Croyier about a small snippet of example code on his site (CSS-Tricks) that didn't follow a11y best practices. He replied, and updated the code! Nice guy.
I assumed "k8s" was so named by skipping out the syllables "ubern" and slightly mangling the rest.
Fortunately I work in the privileged position of never really needing to consider questions of deployment, and I am extremely happy to keep it that way.
It sucks for onboarding new devs, but I've worked at companies where I did a11y audits for high-traffic e-commerce sites. The the amount of times I didn't have to type those extra 9 letters must have saved months of my life.
Maybe this is just because I learned to touch-type rather early, but (1) typing "accessibility" is far faster than typing "a11y", because it doesn't require reaching as far from the home row and (2) it is rare that the limiting factor is the speed at which keys can be pressed, rather than the speed at which correct and accurate words can be chosen.
Text is meant to be read, and not just written. I'll agree that there are chunking benefits in acronyms and abbreviations when working in a shared context, but outside of those shared contexts, the abbreviations severely impede communication.
Its a bit of a self fulfilling prophecy, where people who prefer one type of communication channel will engage mostly with people who engage with $CHANNEL, eventually ending up with the idea that 'everyone uses $CHANNEL'. Like Facebook, pod casts, web forum d'jour, and probably going back in time to Usenet, IRC, Email and maybe even the telegraph.
I don't see subtitles (back to the 80s of accessibility), but it does have playback speed so you can skim and claw back some information bandwidth.
I'm mixed. I enjoy programming video tutorials, but they are often too slow and padded with non-essential and repetitive information. Unless there's a transcript, searching for a part that you need a recap of isn't much different than information retrieval from tape drives in the 60's. The best video tutorials have include a transcript and a github repo.
For graphics programming tutorials a video is a huge help. The huge problem with text articles about complex dev topics is that errors compound - if you're following along and you make a mistake early on you won't necessarily know until much later, by which time it's a lot harder to figure out where you went wrong. Being able to see what was supposed to happen at each step makes it much easier to follow.
Also, with a live stream in particular, you frequently get to see the author make mistakes and stop to figure stuff out rather than just the edited and polished perfection of a published article. I find that really helps to humanize the author, and gives me confidence that even though I'm making a lot of mistakes I'll be able to get to a finished product eventually.
Text is important because it’s searchable - the fascination with zoom and video/audio communication makes documenting and finding knowledge so much harder. This is a problem for me at work, too.
Google automagically captions all YT clips, in addition it OCRs every bit of text in them just like it does to images. You will get those YT clips and images in results to text searches.
I'm in the same boat. I can learn by reading faster than I can watching a video (I tended to skip lectures at university for this reason). Also, often I have partial understanding of the subject already and need clarification of certain points, and it's a lot easier to skim a text and find the information I need than trying to skip through a video to find what I need.
I recently started learning React for a side project I'm working on (in my day job I have more of a machine learning/backend role). There are a ton of coding videos for react. I never understood why people are watching these kind of coding videos, if you can get the same information much more efficiently in text form.
However, I ended up finding a use for them. I've been watching them at the end of the day when I was too tired to do any more coding work. Instead of wasting my time on YouTube, I ended up learning a lot.
I’m much the same ... and I’m saying that as someone who trained as a TV journalist, once hosted his own tv show, put out 134 weekly episodes of a business video series, and even now focuses on putting out 1-2 videos (on businesses <500 staff in this economy) each week.
As a creator, it’s laziness - I can produce a video in far less time than a quality article. As a consumer, I’ve started watching a few more video channels to learn from others - but would much prefer and retain information from the written word.
The compromise I’m approaching: YouTube do a pretty good job of automatically creating subtitles. These are readily formatted so I can add punctuation, edit, and polish into something readable (and searchable).
Here’s an example of what I’ve done - as ‘simple’ as copying the text into my CMS (Wordpress) and then polishing as I read through it with some headings and graphics to make it more readable - https://jacobaldridge.com/dont-waste-a-good-recession/is-thi...
Still a 30 minute exercise, but that’s now a ~5,000 word article on the subject plus graphics plus a video.
Perhaps a tad self-effacing but the sentiment reveals a core truth: publishing a stream-of-consciousness video/audio artifact is easier than releasing a carefully planned and/or edited version.
What we seem to be missing is the processes/norms for annotating, enhancing, indexing, editing these rough digital artifacts.
I’m not sure what the value add of Cloudflare‘s scheduled content is. Some events, like press conferences, are one time occurrences. Some events, like Zoom or YouTube Live, involve multiple contributors or audience participation.
You can see this when you watch a short video or segment and the presenter stammered or misspoke and they couldn't be arsed to just do another take to fix it. As someone who had a bad habit of not rehearsing presentations before giving them, I now can't unsee that bad habit in others.
> I'm a generally technical person and I'm simply flat out uninterested in video content
There are many good videos lectures available on YouTube from Stanford, MIT and other universities. You also have student questions on tape, very much like sitting in the real lecture. Could you explain what exactly makes the content uninteresting, when it is in video format?
I am perfectly capable of skipping the video forward until it gets interesting for me, same like a book. Sometimes you even have skip marks provided by the uploader or user comments where you can jump right into the interesting chapter.
Personally I prefer written content because I can pace it myself. I can skim past stuff that I already know, jump to a different section quickly, and reread complex content. You can play a video at 1.25x or 1.5x but sometimes that can be hard to understand and skipping and finding a section in a video can be time consuming.
I'm not interested in video content either. But in recent years I've found that some people respond much better to it.
Anecdotally, it seems like every student on /r/programmerhumor got through their CS degree with the help of algorithms videos on youtube. Despite having trouble understanding the accent, they found it much easier to learn from the video than the book. I prefer the book, even though I would have had no trouble understanding the accent in which these videos are apparently made.
My partner is the same. Finds it difficult to concentrate on a textbook, but easy when it's people talking. I'm not wired this way, and I don't understand why others are wired differently from you and me, but I do accept that it works for them.
The consensus Hacker News would have you think that plain text is the pinnacle of human communication because it's searchable, copy-able, skimmable etc. But many people feel differently. Cloudflare.tv is for them.
It's somewhat simple: we have a lot of processing power dedicated to communicating with people. We also have a ROM + BIOS in our brains for caring about other people and liking to interact with them. Reading and writing are quite unnatural, in comparison.
> Despite having trouble understanding the accent, they found it much easier to learn from the video than the book.
In my experience, a video and a textbook will often present content radically differently - even when they're both by the same person and for the same audience.
You give a CS professor a blackboard to explain a binary tree and they'll explain it to the level of "and three is less than five, so we go left at this node"
Ask the same professor to write a textbook, and they'll instead start writing ∑ and ∃ and defining what an integer is.
In my current experience blog > video > book. There were only books when I was a student. The only chance I got to study on videos were some MOOCs years ago but there were no books or blogs to compare them too. The experience was mostly ok but unfortunately I often had to pause the video to read formulas and sometimes go back to listen again to some explanations. Written text is much better for that. Furthermore one hour of video is one hour of time and it's not easy to get an idea of what is coming up in the next minutes. Text makes that easy.
Having people read the symbols to me is much, much smoother than trying to decipher them myself. They read it to me in English. The writing is in super-compact squiggle-squiggle. I prefer English.
[EDIT] for math-heavy content in particular, that is. In general I don't like video very much.
I'm not so sure that we're in the minority, those of us that prefer text over video. I just think that it's a lot easier to sell video than text and that subscriptions to learning services are the tech equivalent of Gym subscriptions.
I have a Linux Academy subscription and I find that the labs are really useful (they do range in quality to be fair) and that the courses are next to useless but, and this is a big but, the text content that the courses provide gives you, with the labs, probably as much as the videos.
Idk, maybe I'm doing the videos wrong or have the wrong expectations.
> we're in the minority, and there is enough of a technical audience that would prefer to watch this kind of stuff than read it.
Note, you can be in the vast majority and the second half of the sentence can be true. A media channel that only reaches 10% of your customer base can still make sense.
I like both, video content on fields/interests related to stuff I'm interested in is great if it doesn't require really deep focus, often I watch those at 110-150% speed.
If I'm really trying to grok material a quiet room and a book is still the best.
So it's a case of the nature of the content fitting the form of the content.
I think this kind of stuff would be nice to tune into the same way that I look at HN. I don’t think it’s great for targeted watching, but good for discovery.
Videos are great for motivating me to dig into a topic, but when I actually have to apply that knowledge then I get quite frustrated.
There's really no good way for me to make a bibliography of videos. And even when you do find the bit you care about, the presentation is rarely at the speed of absorption, so you end up pausing and rewinding a lot (and sometimes, there simply is no rewind button, and jumping back 15 seconds in an hour video? forget about it.)
I recall during the dotcom boom someone discovered that there was just a little bit of unused bandwidth in TV signals and wanted to earmark it for adding hypertext to the video, so that with a smart tv you could jump to further reading on a subject. This seems like a best of both worlds situation and I was disappointed to see it go nowhere.
I wonder if there's a way to do something similar with the CC data in videos...
A quick shazam yields "Particle House Feat. Le June - I Don't Mind." Cloudflare seems to be using the instrumental version [found here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=63P67ZdKhXk]
I'm wrong about all sorts of things, but I have a funny feeling that we're going to look back someday and see this as the first of many companies of a significant size launching something that looks just like a TV station. I can't emphasize how incredibly brilliant this is: it appears to be a perfectly curated combination of pure marketing webinar, tutorials, educational lectures and who knows what else. This is an example of a new micro-format, in the same way that the NYT won a Pulitzer for their oft-copied Snowfall. http://www.nytimes.com/projects/2012/snow-fall/index.html
In an era where SEO has ruined the cozy internet, content marketing is transparent and many people just don't trust the media not to lie to them, the idea that a company like CloudFlare could task a team with essentially launching the nerd equivalent of CSPAN (if not CNN) seems to me like something a genius would come up with.
Respectfully, you're thinking too small. Of course CloudFlare can host your TV station. They carry a significant, double-digit percentage of total internet traffic.
The impressive feat here is having the brand position and cultural currency and strategic foresight to launch and run a 24/7 TV station. That is high on the list of non-trivial, capital intensive things to do.
No, what this does is introduce CloudFlare as a media distribution channel, in the same way that Masterclass, Netflix, Twitter and Fortnite are media distribution channels.
> Respectfully, you're thinking too small. Of course CloudFlare can host your TV station. They carry a significant, double-digit percentage of total internet traffic.
This is almost certainly true. I can expand here that I didn't think of CloudFlare as a "TV" company or backbone infrastructure (in the normal media space) company in that way. I think this is the realization that they're trying to get out there.
> The impressive feat here is having the brand position and cultural currency and strategic foresight to launch and run a 24/7 TV station. That is high on the list of non-trivial, capital intensive things to do.
IMO they don't have the cultural currency, but to be fair, I live half a world away from what is arguably the nexus of the culture in this case (SF), so maybe I just can't see it. CloudFlare is a boring company (which is good), I don't know them for making lots of waves in this particular way. IMO what they're betting on is that doing something this big builds that cultural currency, and then it didn't matter how much you had in the first place.
If I were to dumb down your statement -- this is indeed a wonderful flex.
> No, what this does is introduce CloudFlare as a media distribution channel, in the same way that Masterclass, Netflix, Twitter and Fortnite are media distribution channels.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding your statement, but this sounds like what I tried to convey -- CloudFlare is introducing itself as a media distribution channel (for media corporations) and a thought/market leader for the consumer (developers, technical management).
Also, check the other responses to my comment... there's someone lurking in there who is very very close to this whole thing. Interactions like that are why I still come to HN.
I haven't ever really used it, but doesn't Microsoft run its own tv style video series since more than a decade?
I don't understand the format personally (I'd always take articles over video). It's probably appealing to a demographic that I'm not. But in either case, the approach is many years old.
At the time where no one else watches TV anymore... I think it makes sense if they offer the programs in VOD but I don't see where on their website they do that.
> with essentially launching the nerd equivalent of CSPAN (if not CNN)
Maybe I'm in the minority, but at the end of working all day in front of screen doing mentally taxing programming/devops work, the last thing I want to do is come home and watch live TV of content that reminds me of work...nor do I want to spend my weekends doing that either.
Plan is to keep it going as long as there’s interest. We’ll keep filling in slots 7 days out with new live content as well as best-of content that’s already aired.
In general I prefer to read than watch technical content. When you read you can go at your own pace, reference a paragraph/graphic from earlier in the article, reread parts, go fast or slow. Whereas a video it's hard rewatch by rewinding. Limited to 2x max otherwise can't hear a word.
Two doctor friends and I collaborated to make a site that matches PPE donators with hospitals/nursing homes/fire departments/etc that need PPE ( https://maskaherony.com ) . Over 30,000 masks have been donated so far. It’s all volunteer-run and no money changes hands. We host it with Cloudflare Workers Sites (I built it in Jekyll). I assume that much of the interview will be my friend focusing on the medical match aspects and what she’s seeing in hospitals. I’m just the lowly tech guy, she’s the one doing the hard work and saving lives. Check it out if you can!
@eastdakota are you transcoding the vod content alongside any live stuff using a traditional playout mechanism or are you able to leverage existing pre-transcoded VOD assets for non-live content?
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 244 ms ] threadI understand how this benefits Cloudflare, but I don't really see why I'd tune in. Seems like a mix of Cloudflare ads and "technical" content that is barely technical. More vague TED Talk-style philosophy.
If I had to describe who I felt was the target demographic, I'd name middle managers who work in tech but don't actually know much tech.
I mean they have someone from McAfee talking about security, and title it "Cyber: The New Frontier," it is so cringy, and they seemingly don't realize that.
I obviously don't speak for others, so maybe I am wrong and there is a lot of people who want to watch video content showcasing corporate America's biggest tech illiterate "tech" luminaries, spouting their outmoded concepts of what the future will be like from the viewpoint of ten years behind the cutting edge.
Who do you think gives purchase approval for Cloudflare services in an organisation?
[1] https://cloudflare.tv/best-of/478d779664ac0f7ae7fe21064bdcb4...
(Probably the only issue I currently hit doing this is that my ISP forbids me to use well-known ports, and Cloudflare will neither provide free CDN on a non-standard port, nor allow me to do any sort of redirecting to another port using their free service.)
I'm skeptical that viewers will prefer this live scheduled format rather than simply posting all the videos to be viewed on-demand. Don't get me wrong, I love the idea of this anachronism (and especially their 80s-era channel ID logo to go along with it) but personally I prefer to consume videos from tech conferences on-demand. [1]
It looks like they are also posting the videos for on-demand viewing in the Best-Of section, so maybe the live scheduled format is just a delightful gimmick.
[1] https://media.ccc.de is my favourite
A decade + ago, one of my closest friends was a day trader, and while inherently skeptical of CNBC, he and his cohort routinely tuned in to watch her.
As a long time user, customer and promoter, this is puzzling to me to see change in direction and lack of product focus on what brought initial interest (DNS) to Cloudflare in the tech world first with the VPN stuff and now this TV stuff.
Synchronized experience seems to enable some pretty powerful community interactions around discussion and participation that just don't seem to coalesce into a critical mass when everyone experiences (and then comments and participates) asynchronously.
I haven't been beholden to a TV schedule in... ummm... about seventeen years, I think? 2003 sounds about right for my first TiVo. (I was fresh out of college and still affected by the bubble burst, I had to wait for them to come down in price quite a bit.) The only thing I watch live are the occasional sports program and SpaceX launches. Having an actual schedule certainly shoots my personal interest to zippo in this particular product.
If I can go back and watch things, which is not at the moment clear to me, then there's at least a possibility that I would become interested enough in some particular thing to tune in live. But if live viewing is the only option, you're never going to get my attention.
Maybe in certain time zones. We’re well into Monday afternoon here, but Cloudflare TV looks like Sunday afternoon in the 80’s - i.e. nothing to watch.
Can Cloudflare put enough varied programming to make their "TV" channel similarly surprising if you tune in at random? Hard to say, but it would be neat if they managed to pull it off.
i don't really get the point of this. it's just another live conference broadcasting platform? why would people use this instead of just broadcasting on YouTube? Maybe i'm missing something but feels like just another marketing scheme that came from someone saying "hey this coronavirus is supposed to be the fad of the day for video startups, we should do something too".
the 24/7 aspect is cool and it is this point I was excited about. I thought they would do something different, instead of building a service dedicated to a fad which is probably about to expire.
p.s.
The "online conference" angle is not a good idea. Those who say "all tech conferences will die after coronavirus" have probably never been to tech conferences. Most people go to tech conferences not to watch speeches but to network in person. And there's a big difference between networking in person and doing it online in a public place. This problem may be solved in the future, but not through a live video platform, but probably through an AR or a VR platform.
As I said, the 24/7 idea has huge potential and I think cloudflare is well positioned to do something in this arena.
I think this is one of those problems where you never know how someone is going to use tools until you get your hands on them. I used to work for an engineering firm and when we bought our first 3D printer it was a toy. Then we started to realize that it could build tools that we needed on the fly and soon we had a dozen and they were always printing something. We didn't know how to use it until we had it.
Also, thanks for participating in this thread.
I'd be willing to bet that Cloudflare TV is built on top of their Stream infrastructure.
There's Cloudflare-stream[1] and also Mux[2]
[1] https://www.cloudflare.com/products/cloudflare-stream/ [2] https://mux.com/
[3] https://swarmify.com/
MediaConvert will transcode videos to various formats (MP4, HLS, MPEG Dash, etc).
MediaLive does on the fly transcoding for live streams, allows you to select various destinations (if you have a stream key for YouTube, for instance).
MediaPackage is commonly a destination for MediaLive and will act as an origination for live viewing (ideally with a CloudFront distribution in front of it). It also allows for easily converting the HLS to various outputs provided a timestamp (no frame specific clipping which is annoying); MediaConvert doesn't support HLS as input yet -- although you can do it.
MediaStore is basically a low-latency S3 for storage.
MediaTailor allows for stitching in ads.
So you still have to deal with transcoding, storage, etc. Azure has their own media services and Google uses (or bought?) Anvato. I think their service offerings are all pretty similar, but I could be wrong. Actually looking at Anvato, it looks like they provide a couple additional services.
Note: I don't work for AWS, but work for a video platform and we use AWS exclusively.
I appreciated that one, as I did "Code Rush"[3], an embedded documentary following people at Netscape in 1998, even shows the moment Jamie Zawinski bringing the source code and uploading it, or moments where they needed Apple to greenlight using proprietary code, trying to reach Steve Jobs, and ending up implementing it.
Another one I liked was "Downloaded", a documentary about Napster with the main people (Sean Fanning, Sean Parker, Ron Conway, etc.)[4]
PS: Since you're here, I was unable to log to my CloudFlare account for more than a week, reset my password an everything, but always couldn't log in until a couple of days ago. I would have wanted to see a video on the background of the issue and how it was resolved : )
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0NRL7YsXjSg
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aardvark%27d:_12_Weeks_with_Ge...
[3]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Q7FTjhvZ7Y
[4]: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2033981/
A mini version of that is a show that John Graham-Cumming, our CTO, is going to be hosting weekly:
https://cloudflare.tv/schedule/3RbW4iJZAbfN9OetUovuQ2
"Join Cloudflare CTO John Graham-Cumming as he interviews Cloudflare engineers and they discuss a 'war story' of a problem that needed to be solved — and how they did it."
Any chance it will show up as a podcast or on YouTube, or available to watch at another time?
I guess traditional audience participation via call and response would at least put a fairly strict upper-bound on latency...
Cloudflare seems like the sort of company that could pull that off. Netflix is another, if they did live video.
I dont understand the negativity. Looking forward to seeing your channel and your format. Maybe it will work maybe not. Great initiative. I'm from the industry, and people I work with were excited about the news.
Responses here in this thread remind me of /r/linux culture. Strange, it's a HN I haven't seen.
What's unclear is if there is content available only here, such as actual live content.
but this is interesting too
It has become its own cinematography / production style just like the shaky cam style is used to make documentaries feel more authentic or action movies more chaotic.
What exactly am i supposed to be excited about?
I understand video "performs" well in a lot of contexts (and thus is of particular interest to marketing people) but I am always surprised when content targeted broadly towards the technical community is done in a video-first manner. I know a few other people that feel the same, but I can only assume that Cloudflare have done some research on this and figured out that we're in the minority, and there is enough of a technical audience that would prefer to watch this kind of stuff than read it.
I know it's a lot of effort (although maybe automated transcription tools have simplified this?) but it would be awesome if text transcripts were made available of some of this content for the weirdos like me out there :)
Most video content is not at this level; it’s often either glibly oversimplified (content marketing), bogged down in minutiae (how-to guides), or buried under irrelevancies (what’s up guys).
There is something I’d often prefer to consume as a AV recording, and that is interviews/panel discussion. The nuances of articulation, even body language may be informative. Compare and contrast the transcript with the video at https://www.erlang-solutions.com/blog/let-s-talkconcurrency-... for example.
A live lecture is better than video lecture because you can ask questions.
> I think youtube has the potential to bring back DIY repair
This might depend on who you hang out with. I'm a tradesperson in the steel fabrication and construction industry, and I think a lot of people in this area have a propensity to want to fix and / or build pretty much everything themselves. From this perspective, with YouTube and online written guides, DIY repair is stronger than ever.
I recently tried to DIY repair a HP 12A toner cartridge. The Youtube videos in the DIY space are a wild mixture of shoddy camera work (bad quality cameras, bad lighting), language issues (I don't speak Russian nor Hindi) and, honestly, bad quality - there is one specific step involving a specialized tool that can be improvised by a screwdriver and a hammer, but all videos I found it simply went over this crucial step in a second without showing or explaining anything. And this is the case for many DIY videos.
A manufacturer-produced service manual or an iFixit guide however? Crystal clear photos that can be zoomed in, legible English (or at least you can copy and paste stuff to Google Translate!), links to "where to buy spare parts"...
To be fair, learning many mechanical tasks for the first time is really a combination of fundamentals and application specific details (this can apply to most fields outside your expertise). As you mentioned, you can repeat the same task again mostly from memory. You could then extrapolate that knowledge to a different vehicle by referencing the application specific details in a quality service manual.
Videos are helpful because you lack the fundamentals, and they can be great for that.
Agreed with you that I rely on videos less and less as I go. But I just kind of tinker with stuff until I figure it out.
Is there any money in "Youtube for Articles?"
I'd think there's money there, just not sure for whom.
Much like DVD ads used to be unskippable, but only for the non-tech-savvy.
No. I never see ads on Youtube on my own devices, and that barely requires any effort.
I prefer the desktop website because it lets me watch the videos in better quality than the mobile website. m.youtube.com seems to limit the maximum bitrate and/or resolution of the videos. Did anyone else notice that?
As far as I understand it is a creative hack that use a local VPN server or something to block ads.
OTOH, YouTube now has a fairly high bar for monetization (1000 subs, 4000 public watch hours over last year)
A format that seems to work well with non-article is {topical content} + {multiple knowledgeable hosts} + {free form talk format with some segments}.
Early-MTV, the Screen Savers, and Car Talk were all essentially this format.
Good background noise to have playing while working. And the host-host, informal interaction makes it playable for longer than a pure just-the-facts source.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=soK1_DaFym0
Some people will write a book about a subject, but I suspect that's hit and miss as well.
Keeping an article up to date is the reason wikis were invented
So it could be some security via format obscurity.
I had to fix the motor of my vacuum, for that I preferred a youtube tutorial because I want to see someone do the things I an about to do.
If on the other hand I am trying to do something in Blender I usually prefer a text tutorial to get the exact bit of information I am looking for.
Compare it to conventional teaching. You usually don't throw pupils a book with all the knowledge the could need once they can read and call it a day,but you try to ahow them how things are done.
But code, I generally like reading because most of it is abstract and in your head anyways. So I think the best media depends on what you're doing and what type of learner you are.
I'll add that sometimes I read a dozen articles and just don't get it. Then I watch an OCW and everything just clicks. The reverse also happens. Sometimes you just need a different format and/or a different voice. More options only helps.
I think it has to do with how much tacit information is embedded in your activity. Blender or vacuum motor repair videos? Yes please, because the problem domain is such that I actually need to see all the things that happen in the background of the main activity, just to reassure myself I'm on the right track. Coding? God no, typing text into computer is a very constrained activity and you gain nothing by showing it on video vs. just making an article.
I'm sure that's the case for many people. There's also a much broader audience of people who want to do these jailbreaks than programmers who are used to reading documentation. I imagine videos are drastically more accessible for them.
Often people want a quick fix designed specifically for them, and do not want to read even a few pages of docs.
I think you'd be surprised at the wide availability of written information and guides for emulation.
Other emulators, dolphin in particular, are fantastic in this regard.
I think I have interacted with authors on the blog a few times via comments - for me doing it "asynchronously" is probably going to be more applicable to me anyway.
I'll definitely check it out as time permits but just wanted to mention my preferences are definitely more on the written side :) Thanks for reading & again for your response.
The Cloudflare blog has excellent content, I've been a long-time fan and have shared links to it with colleagues.
All that said, I feel that Cloudflare TV is a brilliant concept. The fact that such a fresh creative idea was embraced and implemented, I can see how the company culture encourages and supports collaborative innovation.
Looking at the listing of shows, I remembered my teenage years, like how I enjoyed the variety of creative talents on early MTV. I'm excited to catch some of the Cloudflare shows live - I'll probably use the picture-in-picture feature of the browser, to have a permanent window on a corner of my screen, with the live streams.
This is really important. I have moderate hearing loss but can hear 'okay' with a hearing aid. I place where I worked had a lot of mandatory training that involved video presentations. They introduced one new video and I realised that there was one bit where some important info (it was needed to pass the post video test) was only presented in spoken form, with no transcript or captions. I could follow it but a person with profound hearing loss would have struggled. Because I am sensitised to accessibility issues I decided to make a fuss about this.
In a superb piece of irony, the subject of the training video was actually diversity issues in the workplace. I therefore contacted the training department saying "Did you know that your diversity training discriminates against deaf people?" To give them credit, they said 'oops our bad' and quickly added captions.
Your example is a great one, but aside from audio and visual problems, a11y covers things like cognitive deficits, which, for some, make watching and learning from videos difficult.
> I decided to make a fuss about this.
Good on you, more people need to be making a fuss about this.
I actually wrote Chris Croyier about a small snippet of example code on his site (CSS-Tricks) that didn't follow a11y best practices. He replied, and updated the code! Nice guy.
Compare to i18n, l10n.
Fortunately I work in the privileged position of never really needing to consider questions of deployment, and I am extremely happy to keep it that way.
Text is meant to be read, and not just written. I'll agree that there are chunking benefits in acronyms and abbreviations when working in a shared context, but outside of those shared contexts, the abbreviations severely impede communication.
I don't see subtitles (back to the 80s of accessibility), but it does have playback speed so you can skim and claw back some information bandwidth.
Also, with a live stream in particular, you frequently get to see the author make mistakes and stop to figure stuff out rather than just the edited and polished perfection of a published article. I find that really helps to humanize the author, and gives me confidence that even though I'm making a lot of mistakes I'll be able to get to a finished product eventually.
The two formats definitely complement each other, they are good for different purposes.
Thank you on behalf of everybody.
However, I ended up finding a use for them. I've been watching them at the end of the day when I was too tired to do any more coding work. Instead of wasting my time on YouTube, I ended up learning a lot.
As a creator, it’s laziness - I can produce a video in far less time than a quality article. As a consumer, I’ve started watching a few more video channels to learn from others - but would much prefer and retain information from the written word.
The compromise I’m approaching: YouTube do a pretty good job of automatically creating subtitles. These are readily formatted so I can add punctuation, edit, and polish into something readable (and searchable).
That also provides a text transcript!
As someone who's used the text transcripts to "search" through Youtube video content, I'd say you're on the right track.
Here’s an example of what I’ve done - as ‘simple’ as copying the text into my CMS (Wordpress) and then polishing as I read through it with some headings and graphics to make it more readable - https://jacobaldridge.com/dont-waste-a-good-recession/is-thi...
Still a 30 minute exercise, but that’s now a ~5,000 word article on the subject plus graphics plus a video.
Perhaps a tad self-effacing but the sentiment reveals a core truth: publishing a stream-of-consciousness video/audio artifact is easier than releasing a carefully planned and/or edited version.
What we seem to be missing is the processes/norms for annotating, enhancing, indexing, editing these rough digital artifacts.
I’m not sure what the value add of Cloudflare‘s scheduled content is. Some events, like press conferences, are one time occurrences. Some events, like Zoom or YouTube Live, involve multiple contributors or audience participation.
You can see this when you watch a short video or segment and the presenter stammered or misspoke and they couldn't be arsed to just do another take to fix it. As someone who had a bad habit of not rehearsing presentations before giving them, I now can't unsee that bad habit in others.
There are many good videos lectures available on YouTube from Stanford, MIT and other universities. You also have student questions on tape, very much like sitting in the real lecture. Could you explain what exactly makes the content uninteresting, when it is in video format?
Text lets me efficiently skip through most of articles if they do not get to the point, or if they linger in ELI5.
The more I know about a field, the more I want to skip bits, because I don't need to be explained the basics over again.
Anecdotally, it seems like every student on /r/programmerhumor got through their CS degree with the help of algorithms videos on youtube. Despite having trouble understanding the accent, they found it much easier to learn from the video than the book. I prefer the book, even though I would have had no trouble understanding the accent in which these videos are apparently made.
My partner is the same. Finds it difficult to concentrate on a textbook, but easy when it's people talking. I'm not wired this way, and I don't understand why others are wired differently from you and me, but I do accept that it works for them.
The consensus Hacker News would have you think that plain text is the pinnacle of human communication because it's searchable, copy-able, skimmable etc. But many people feel differently. Cloudflare.tv is for them.
In my experience, a video and a textbook will often present content radically differently - even when they're both by the same person and for the same audience.
You give a CS professor a blackboard to explain a binary tree and they'll explain it to the level of "and three is less than five, so we go left at this node"
Ask the same professor to write a textbook, and they'll instead start writing ∑ and ∃ and defining what an integer is.
[EDIT] for math-heavy content in particular, that is. In general I don't like video very much.
I have a Linux Academy subscription and I find that the labs are really useful (they do range in quality to be fair) and that the courses are next to useless but, and this is a big but, the text content that the courses provide gives you, with the labs, probably as much as the videos.
Idk, maybe I'm doing the videos wrong or have the wrong expectations.
We are. Just the fact that every modern OS uses GUIs should tell you something ;-)
Note, you can be in the vast majority and the second half of the sentence can be true. A media channel that only reaches 10% of your customer base can still make sense.
If I'm really trying to grok material a quiet room and a book is still the best.
So it's a case of the nature of the content fitting the form of the content.
There's really no good way for me to make a bibliography of videos. And even when you do find the bit you care about, the presentation is rarely at the speed of absorption, so you end up pausing and rewinding a lot (and sometimes, there simply is no rewind button, and jumping back 15 seconds in an hour video? forget about it.)
I recall during the dotcom boom someone discovered that there was just a little bit of unused bandwidth in TV signals and wanted to earmark it for adding hypertext to the video, so that with a smart tv you could jump to further reading on a subject. This seems like a best of both worlds situation and I was disappointed to see it go nowhere.
I wonder if there's a way to do something similar with the CC data in videos...
@eastdakota any chance of a link to the musician who wrote it?
In an era where SEO has ruined the cozy internet, content marketing is transparent and many people just don't trust the media not to lie to them, the idea that a company like CloudFlare could task a team with essentially launching the nerd equivalent of CSPAN (if not CNN) seems to me like something a genius would come up with.
This might be advertisement/marketing on two levels; both consumers and large corporations that might want to host a TV station.
The impressive feat here is having the brand position and cultural currency and strategic foresight to launch and run a 24/7 TV station. That is high on the list of non-trivial, capital intensive things to do.
No, what this does is introduce CloudFlare as a media distribution channel, in the same way that Masterclass, Netflix, Twitter and Fortnite are media distribution channels.
This is almost certainly true. I can expand here that I didn't think of CloudFlare as a "TV" company or backbone infrastructure (in the normal media space) company in that way. I think this is the realization that they're trying to get out there.
> The impressive feat here is having the brand position and cultural currency and strategic foresight to launch and run a 24/7 TV station. That is high on the list of non-trivial, capital intensive things to do.
IMO they don't have the cultural currency, but to be fair, I live half a world away from what is arguably the nexus of the culture in this case (SF), so maybe I just can't see it. CloudFlare is a boring company (which is good), I don't know them for making lots of waves in this particular way. IMO what they're betting on is that doing something this big builds that cultural currency, and then it didn't matter how much you had in the first place.
If I were to dumb down your statement -- this is indeed a wonderful flex.
> No, what this does is introduce CloudFlare as a media distribution channel, in the same way that Masterclass, Netflix, Twitter and Fortnite are media distribution channels.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding your statement, but this sounds like what I tried to convey -- CloudFlare is introducing itself as a media distribution channel (for media corporations) and a thought/market leader for the consumer (developers, technical management).
Also, check the other responses to my comment... there's someone lurking in there who is very very close to this whole thing. Interactions like that are why I still come to HN.
I don't understand the format personally (I'd always take articles over video). It's probably appealing to a demographic that I'm not. But in either case, the approach is many years old.
Maybe I'm in the minority, but at the end of working all day in front of screen doing mentally taxing programming/devops work, the last thing I want to do is come home and watch live TV of content that reminds me of work...nor do I want to spend my weekends doing that either.
Video is more limiting.
Two doctor friends and I collaborated to make a site that matches PPE donators with hospitals/nursing homes/fire departments/etc that need PPE ( https://maskaherony.com ) . Over 30,000 masks have been donated so far. It’s all volunteer-run and no money changes hands. We host it with Cloudflare Workers Sites (I built it in Jekyll). I assume that much of the interview will be my friend focusing on the medical match aspects and what she’s seeing in hospitals. I’m just the lowly tech guy, she’s the one doing the hard work and saving lives. Check it out if you can!