Layercake

Layercake: Scaling global sports streaming with 85% cost savings

Layercake is a Sydney-based leader in technical innovation, specializing in media automation and orchestration. Their flagship platform, Streamcake, is a vendor-agnostic hub that interconnects 50+ digital services to transform passive streaming into interactive, multi-layered experiences at a global scale.

As a 2026 Sports Technology Awards finalist in multiple categories, they empower broadcasters and rights holders to deploy business-critical workflows — from AI-driven highlights to real-time commerce. They provide the technical backbone that simplifies complex delivery, helping our partners push the boundaries of modern fan engagement.

The challenge: Breaking the bottleneck of "high-volume, low-viewership"

Before Cloudflare, Layercake faced significant commercial bottlenecks when scaling for amateur and lower-tier sporting events.Traditional broadcast and cloud models were cost-prohibitive for high-volume, low-viewership scenarios, where processing costs often outweighed commercial viability.

Legacy infrastructure also struggled with "startup spikes" — the massive demand for compute and network resources required when hundreds of matches in a tournament begin simultaneously.

Layercake now offers Cloudflare to replace fragmented stacks with a unified, developer-friendly pipeline. They required a partner capable of handling sudden bursts of orchestration calls and incoming bandwidth without performance degradation. By integrating Cloudflare, they aimed to scale up to hundreds of concurrent live events globally, simplify pricing to ensure commercial viability for grassroots sports and eliminate latency in initializing video processing pipelines.

"The model of running many events with a lower volume of viewers meant processing costs outweighed commercial viability,” Domenic Romeo, Co-Founder, CTO, Layercake said. “Cloudflare Stream allows us to provide sporting organizations with a truly viable solution to grow their sport."

A unified pipeline for rapid global deployment

Layercake integrated Cloudflare Stream into the Streamcake ecosystem to manage the receiving, processing, storage, and delivery of video via a single API.

This all-in-one architecture removed the overhead of managing separate encoding and processing configurations, allowing Layercake to deliver their advanced features like reusable vision inputs, automated clipping, and intelligent routing on a scalable, cost-effective platform.

The business benefits were immediate and quantifiable. By utilizing Cloudflare’s global network, Layercake customers achieved a zero-egress-fee model since processing and delivery occur within the same network.

This shift resulted in savings of up to 85% compared to previous workflow models. Deployment speed also saw a radical improvement: while alternative solutions took minutes to initialize, Cloudflare consistently establishes production-ready pipelines in just 10 seconds.

"With Cloudflare, we’ve effectively removed the 'integration tax' that usually comes with scaling global video,” says Domenic. “We can now confidently offer a commercially viable solution for events that were previously too expensive to stream, allowing us and our customers to grow at a pace that simply wouldn't be possible on alternative processing and delivery models."

During a regular high-traffic period, Streamcake launches over 300 live events simultaneously within one minute. Cloudflare handles the resulting API traffic and compute demands without a drop in performance, providing real-time analytics and disconnection alerts that allows Layercake to react instantly to changing venue conditions.

"We are now seeing incredibly low latency to set up new video processing pipelines,” says Domenic. “Averaging 10 seconds compared to multiple minutes on alternative solutions gives us the ability to scale more rapidly and efficiently."

Looking to the future with Cloudflare

Layercake is focused on deepening their partnership with Cloudflare by integrating AI intelligence and enhanced security into their automated workflows.

Over the coming months, they plan to enable self-sufficient creation of workflows that leverage Cloudflare’s global distribution to create better experiences for both operators and viewers. As Domenic puts it: "Watch this space. We see opportunities to extend the pipeline with AI intelligence and more automation, especially around intelligent use of the service for even further economic optimisations at scale. This will allow our customers to reap the benefit of the value this partnership and integration has created."