The Concept
Reading docs. Listening to engineers talk on calls and not understanding half of it. Going through trainings where nothing clicks. The everyday grind of selling a platform you haven’t actually built on.
Then one day, an idea hits: what if I just build it myself?
That’s the story behind “The Lightbulb Moment” — a short AI-generated film about the shift from passively selling technology to actively building with it. Dark, moody, real. The grind first, then the spark.
The video was created using Kling AI (AI video generation) with prompts crafted in Claude AI. And it’s delivered using Cloudflare Stream — product number 9 on saltwaterbrc.com.
Watch It
Can’t see the video? Watch it on the Stream page →
What Is Cloudflare Stream?
Stream is Cloudflare’s video platform. Upload a video. Stream handles encoding, storage, adaptive bitrate delivery, and gives you a player. That’s it. No FFmpeg. No transcoding pipeline. No CDN configuration. No managing video infrastructure.
If Pages is “upload HTML, get a website,” Stream is “upload a video, get a player.”
How I Built This
Step 1: Create the video. I used Kling AI to generate a cinematic short film from a text prompt. Dark teal and orange palette, moody lighting, a narrative arc from frustration to focus.
Step 2: Upload to Stream. Dragged the video file into the Cloudflare dashboard under Stream. It processed in about a minute — transcoding to multiple bitrates automatically.
Step 3: Embed. Stream gave me an iframe embed code with a video UID. I dropped it into the Astro page and this blog post. Done.
Total infrastructure I had to manage: zero. No S3 buckets. No MediaConvert jobs. No CloudFront distributions. No Video.js configuration. Just upload and embed.
Why This Matters for Enterprise Customers
Video is the hardest content type to serve on the internet. A single 1080p video needs multiple bitrate versions, different codec encodings, adaptive streaming manifests, storage, a CDN, and a player. Most companies either pay YouTube (and get ads and recommendations) or build expensive pipelines on AWS.
Stream replaces all of that. And it integrates natively with the rest of Cloudflare:
- Stream + Access = video that only authorized users can watch. Training videos behind Zero Trust authentication. No third-party platform touching sensitive content.
- Stream + Workers = custom video logic at the edge. Validate tokens, enforce rate limits, log views.
- Stream + R2 = raw assets stored with zero egress. Stream handles the delivery optimization.
For media companies, e-commerce, internal comms, education, healthcare — anywhere video needs to be fast, secure, and simple.
The Stack Now
saltwaterbrc.com runs on 9 Cloudflare products:
Astro (framework), Pages (hosting), Workers (API), Durable Objects (visitor counter), R2 (storage), Workers AI (inference), Vectorize (vector search), AI Gateway (observability), and now Stream (video).
Total monthly cost: ~$5. Nine products. One domain. No origin server.
What’s Next
Phase 7 is Cloudflare Zero Trust — adding Access, Tunnel, and Gateway to protect the site and demonstrate the full SASE/SSE platform. That’s the security story. But for now, hit play on the video above and see what happens when you stop selling what you don’t know and start building what you sell.