Cloudflare Inc. is making another major enhancement to its content delivery network.

A day after launching an “Unmetered Mitigation” program that offers protection against distributed denial-of-service attacks without any service limits, the company today unveiled a homegrown video delivery service. Cloudflare is hardly the first CDN provider to have tried its hand at media streaming, but the new product takes the concept several steps further than most rivals.

Stream, as it’s called, handles more than just the networking aspect of video delivery. The service also performs encoding to make clips compatible with different platforms and provides a customizable media player for embedding them in web pages. 

Cloudflare is touting Stream as a superior alternative to traditional video distribution methods. Typically, the choice companies face is to either host their content on an outside platform such as YouTube or set up a dedicated streaming pipeline. The latter option until now has required separately paying for an encoding service, a media player and a CDN, which are usually each billed in a different way.

Stream bundles everything into one bill based on the amount of video content a company’s users consume as measured in viewing time. As a result, the service should be particularly appealing to organizations that have been using multiple tools for video delivery until now. Firms typically go down this route so they can tailor the video viewing experience, which isn’t possible with services such as YouTube.

The customizable media player included in Stream addresses this requirement. Moreover, Cloudflare is also targeting less savvy companies that do post their videos on YouTube or Vimeo for convenience’s sake. The provider plans to launch an extension through its recently introduced app store that will offer a simple drag-and-drop upload interface for nontechnical users.

There’s a big potential market for Stream. Companies publish product walkthroughs, customer interviews, webinars and many other types of multimedia content as part of their marketing efforts. With video content accounting for over 70 percent of Internet data usage, there’s a significant amount of revenue to be made.

Stream could also give Cloudflare an edge over rival CDN providers. The ability to handle every aspect of web page and media delivery through a single platform is a potentially major convenience from an administrative standpoint, particularly for companies such as broadcasters that have a lot of video content.

Cloudflare Stream is currently available in beta.

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