A broadcaster publishes to one address from ordinary broadcasting software. Viewers open a page in a browser and watch, with no player to install and nothing for the broadcaster to run in front of them.

The connection is RTMPS, and only RTMPS: the plain form carries the key that authorises the broadcast as readable text, so it is not offered at all rather than accepted and discouraged. The address and the key come from the console and go into the broadcasting software's own settings, which is the whole of the setup. Broadcasts are accepted up to 2K.

Viewers get a separate identifier from the one the broadcaster publishes with, so the key that authorises a broadcast never travels in a request a browser makes. Playback is a page or an HLS address, and both come back with the channel rather than being assembled by hand.

What is published is always offered to viewers unchanged — it is never re-encoded on the way to becoming the top quality. A channel may also offer qualities below it, produced for viewers whose connection cannot carry the one that was sent; the player picks one and moves between them as the connection changes. How many a channel may offer is what its pack says, because each one is an encoder running for the length of the broadcast.

A channel is reached in one of two ways, chosen when it is created. It can live at one city you pick, reached across the public internet by everybody; or it can be reached through our own network, so a viewer connects to the location nearest them and the broadcast travels the rest of the way inside it. Both are cached the same way — a location pulls the broadcast across once a second whatever the audience — so the difference is the path, not the cost of an extra viewer.

Stream is included in every account's free plan, at these allowances.

Allowances are per account. Pro and Business are switched on by request: open a ticket at the Help Centre. Usage is in the console. All platform plans

• Cloudflare Stream alternative
• Mux alternative
• Amazon IVS alternative