Cloud Streaming Services (CSS) and VOD

Cloud Streaming Services and VOD are the most distinctive thing on Tencent Cloud International. Tencent built them for its own live business before opening them up, so low-latency lines, recording and transcoding templates and the mobile live SDK arrive as one product rather than a CDN in a streaming costume. Cross-border streaming rarely fails for lack of compute — it fails on host uplink, cross-border origin pulls, and playback latency for overseas viewers.

Specs & pricing

The end-to-end chain and what each stage needs

Live streaming is not "rent a box and push to it". The chain has four stages, each with its own configuration and its own failure mode. Get one wrong and viewers see stutter or a black screen.

• Ingest: the host pushes RTMP or SRT from OBS, the mobile live SDK or a web SDK. The ingest node sets uplink quality, and hosts abroad need uplink bandwidth assessed separately.
• Transcoding: one stream becomes several resolutions and bitrates. More renditions means more cost — pick them from the devices viewers actually use.
• Recording: streams can be written out automatically into a replay file in a COS bucket or VOD you nominate, with configurable duration and callbacks.
• Delivery: playback goes out through a playback domain, optionally fronted by a CDN. Paid content should enable playback auth so a shared URL cannot be resold.

What the streaming invoice contains

• Playback traffic or bandwidth: the dominant cost, driven by concurrent viewers × watch time × bitrate.
• Transcoding: billed on output resolution and duration. Multi-rendition delivery is the main increment.
• Recording and storage: recorded files land in COS or VOD, with storage and later retrieval traffic billed separately.
• VOD traffic and add-ons: VOD playback is priced like live playback, and replay-heavy work should use a prepaid traffic pack; screenshots, watermarking, quality inspection and global acceleration bill by usage. Unit prices follow the live official rate.

When low-latency streaming is worth it

Low-latency streaming keeps what the viewer sees close to what the host just did: a commerce host answering a comment, a game streamer calling a play, a commentator staying on the picture. Tencent Cloud offers standard and low-latency lines. The low-latency path is shorter end to end, and the cost is potentially higher bitrate for the same quality plus a higher line charge. The test is whether the business genuinely needs two-way interaction — for a broadcast-style event, standard streaming is already enough.

Placing overseas ingest and acceleration nodes

Comparing streaming approaches

International vs China site for live streaming

From account to first broadcast

1. Settle three things first: where the hosts are, which countries the viewers are in, and whether the stream needs real-time interaction or is mostly watched later. Those answers decide low latency and acceleration.
2. We handle official registration and provisioning of the Tencent Cloud International account. No personal credit card binding, no personal identity documents on your side.
3. Once live, enable the streaming service, configure the ingest and playback domains plus both auth settings, and confirm a host can push.
4. Configure transcoding and recording templates, landing files in COS with a lifecycle rule.
5. Run a real-device test with the mobile live SDK or web SDK, check weak-network behaviour and overseas playback, then go live.
6. If you want us to settle payment, we pay at the discounted rate and issue a statement, and you can verify usage in the console.

The two things that most often go wrong