Amazon's CEO Uses 8 Minute Video On YouTube To Explain Zappos Deal

You gotta love it when a company like Amazon users the power of video to get their message out. Amazon's CEO Jeff Bezos has an eight minute video uploaded to YouTube to explain the company's acquisition of Zappos. Now that's how video should be used.

As good as the content of the video is, the quality is terrible for me. Wish Amazon had used a service other than YouTube.

Comments

[Nico]

It's a great, informal "blog" style video - it's not YouTube's fault the video looks "terrible" - user 07272009july did not upload a video file that was encoded properly and it doesn't look like they were using an HD camera, anyway.

Given the style of the video, maybe they were going for something "low tech" with an amateurish look & feel to keep it "real".

Thanks for the post, Dan.

[Dan Rayburn]

Hi Nico, "not encoded properly" how? And why do they have to use an HD camera in order to have good quality? They should be able to shoot a very good quality video without it having to be in HD, especially since there is very little movement in the video itself.

Nothing wrong with being "low tech", but that's not an excuse for poor quality video with lots of pixelation.

[nico]

Hey Dan,

YouTube should automatically detect an HD codec when one uploads a video, Jan wrote an excellent tutorial on this very subject and how to tweak for YouTube:

http://www.streaminglearningcenter.com/articles/18/1/YouTube-does-720P-HD-using-H264/Page1.html

Basically, they shot it 16:9 but didn't encode and upload an h.264 format so YouTube is displaying it poorly, I would love to know what they encoded it at before uploading.

And, I would hate to think that such a well produced video from a Company such as Amazon would feature poor quality video.

I prefer shooting in HD whenever possible, but even SD transcoded properly can trick YouTube into displaying it with their HD player... thus, losing that grainy quality.

Below is a link to really "poor" quality video that was transcoded to make YouTube think it is HD, and it's not - and it isn't very grainy, except where the raw footage was sooo bad, it couldn't be helped.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ag2Wt8Z1h6w

Either Amazon's team uploaded low quality video on purpose or not, but I don't think YouTube is to blame.

All the best,
N