High-performance Video Streaming
Deliver Stored Videos to Viewers Over a Global CDN
Stream videos seamlessly with global CDN delivery and lightning-fast performance.
This page is about the delivery side: getting an already-stored video to play smoothly in a viewer's browser, wherever they are. files.link serves your video files from a global CDN, and because modern browsers stream MP4 and WebM natively over HTTP range requests, a plain <video src="..."> tag pointed at a CDN URL gives you seek-able, buffer-light playback with no media server and no transcoding pipeline to operate.
The practical setup: upload the playable file once (POST /v1/files/{folderId} → PUT the bytes to the presigned url → POST /v1/files/confirm-upload with { ids:[...] }, authenticating with your raw API key), mark the folder public, and drop the resulting CDN URL straight into your player. The CDN honors byte-range requests, so a viewer who jumps to the 40-minute mark of a long recording fetches only the bytes around that point instead of downloading the whole file — that is what makes scrubbing feel instant.
files.link does not transcode, so you bring the renditions. If you want adaptive bitrate, generate your HLS or DASH segments and playlists ahead of time, upload each .ts/.m4s segment and .m3u8/.mpd manifest as ordinary files, and point hls.js or your player at the manifest URL — every segment is then a fast CDN fetch. For a single progressive MP4 at a sensible bitrate, you often don't need any of that.
To gate access (paid courses, member-only video), keep the file private and stream through short-lived signed URLs your backend mints per viewing session.
The storage of the master itself is covered on video-storage; the raw delivery layer on video-cdn; captions on video-subtitle-storage; and retained broadcasts on live-stream-archive and webinar-recording-hosting — if you keep a post-event replay library, archive live streams for replay instead of leaving them to expire on the streaming platform.
Billing is prepaid credits against storage and bandwidth — crucially, there is no per-minute-watched or per-minute-encoded charge, so a video that suddenly gets popular costs you bandwidth, not a metered streaming surcharge.
Benefits With No Complexity
Global CDN delivery
Edge-cached worldwide
Signed-URL security
What You Get
Unlimited files
Unlimited storage
Public + Private storage
CDN ready links
Prepaid credits
More coming soon
How files.link Works
1. Upload
2. Copy
3. Use Anywhere
Why Developers Choose files.link
A Better Way to Store & Deliver Files
| Mux | Cloudflare Stream | Bunny Stream | files.link | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Native HTML5 playback (no media server) | ||||
| HTTP range requests for instant seeking | ||||
| No per-minute streamed/encoded fees | ||||
| Serve your own pre-built HLS/DASH segments | ||||
| Signed URLs to gate paid video | ||||
| Prepaid credits billing |
Calculate Your Needs
Storage
Egress
CDN Bandwidth
Start Streaming Videos Today
- Global CDN delivery
- Edge-cached worldwide
- Signed-URL security
- Unlimited files
- Unlimited storage
- Public + Private storage
- No subscription — prepaid credits keep spend predictable