There has always been discussion over media streaming via Cloudflare, involving tunnels (to bypass CGNAT), proxied traffic (orange cloud) and straight dns only traffic (grey cloud).
It looks like the Cloudflare docs are now putting that to bed, with the docs stating "From the beginning, we prohibited streaming video content using our bandwidth".
Proxied traffic (orange cloud) is Cloudflare's bandwidth right, not to mention tunnels?
TOS (02 June 2026):
Cloudflare’s content delivery network (the “CDN”) Service can be used to cache and serve web pages and websites. Unless you are an Enterprise customer, Cloudflare offers specific Paid Services (e.g., the Developer Platform, Images, and Stream) that you must use in order to serve video and other large files via the CDN. Cloudflare reserves the right to disable or limit your access to or use of the CDN, or to limit your End Users’ access to certain of your resources through the CDN, if you use or are suspected of using the CDN without such Paid Services to serve video or a disproportionate percentage of pictures, audio files, or other large files. We will use reasonable efforts to provide you with notice of such action.
link: https://www.cloudflare.com/de-de/service-specific-terms-application-services/
Cloudflare Dev Docs (25 Aug 2026)
Cloudflare launched in 2010 believing everyone deserves a secure, fast, reliable web presence. We did not think you should have to pay more when you came under cyber attack, so we offered free and fixed-rate pricing for websites. That worked because most websites do not consume much bandwidth, and so we could provide our services in an affordable way to everyone. From the beginning, we prohibited streaming video content using our bandwidth. While you could embed a video from another provider, we limited your ability to use our services to deliver video bits from our network to your visitors. This restriction exists because every second of a typical video requires as much bandwidth as loading a full web page.
Over time we recognized that some of our customers wanted to stream video using our network. To accommodate them, we developed our Stream ↗ product. Stream delivers great performance at an affordable rate charged based on how much load you place on our network.
Unfortunately, while most people respect these limitations and understand they exist to ensure high quality of service for all Cloudflare customers, some users attempt to misconfigure our service to stream video in violation of our service-specific terms ↗. We want to make sure our service is great for everyone, including public service initiatives we run like Project Galileo ↗, The Athenian Project ↗, and Project Fair Shot ↗. A handful of people misusing our service limits our ability to run these initiatives.
Source: r/PleX · by /u/UnfathomableBrit