LOS ANGELES — Amazon has taken on YouTube by offering another venue where anyone can post videos and get paid for it. But the e-tailer has made the process much more cumbersome than its main rival.
Amazon Video Direct allows creators to upload their own videos for "tens of millions" of members of Amazon's Prime Video service to watch. The service is a direct competitor to Google's YouTube, the world's most popular video network with over 1 billion viewers monthly, and an additional way to keep Amazon members paying $99 yearly for the Prime two-day-shipping and entertainment package.
The YouTube Partner program gives amateur filmmakers, singers, videogame enthusiasts, vloggers and others a cut of the revenue from ads that run before and on their YouTube videos. Creators on Amazon Video Direct can also get monthly revenue from posting videos there.
Competition is always great, but in this case, Amazon has a long way to get YouTube's "millions" of creators on board.
The problem is a process that may be OK for a staffed film studio but is much more difficult for amateurs, even the YouTube "pros," like Swedish videogame commentator PewDiePie (with 12 billion YouTube video views) or comedy duo Smosh (with 5.5 billion views.)
Anyone with an Amazon account can upload videos to Video Direct. After you put in your bank information and social security, just as with YouTube, the process involves several steps.
Amazon has very specific photo requests: it needs files as "key art," that need to be presented in 1200x1600 pixels and 1920x1080 pixels format. If you don't have Adobe Photoshop or another imaging program, you'll need it.
You’ll need to add in info about the cast and crew, even if it’s just you talking to the camera.
Another rule is that you must have captioning on the video. YouTube and Vimeo offer these services for free. Amazon won’t let you upload the file until you upload the captioning as a file, and routes you to online captioning firms, which will create the file for you, for a fee.
That's distinctly more complicated than the three-part process for a YouTube upload, which requires title, description and tagging.
In the sample video I uploaded, a 60-second videolog of my hometown, Manhattan Beach, without any dialogue, I still had to spend $2 to get the caption file made from a firm called Rev before I could proceed with the upload.
Lastly, unlike YouTube, where the video is posted almost immediately, Amazon says it will take 3-5 days before your work appears on the site.
Amazon Video Direct "is not an 'upload and go' service," says Amazon spokeswoman Rena Lunak, "so there is going to be some wait time involved."
Amazon says it wants "professional produced videos," whether is movies, TV series, web series, digital shorts and the like, with the idea that your video would join polished product in the Prime Video offering. Content creators are paid $0.15 an hour for US viewers of their fare, or 55% of the sale price for a short-term rental.
In a statement, Amazon touched on the many complicated steps for uploading. "Our goal is to deliver the broadest selection of premium content to our customers so we are requiring that videos be high quality and have direct captioning support. We’re constantly evaluating customer feedback to improve the experience."
In addition, Amazon is launching a $1 million monthly pool to hand out bonuses to creators whose work makes the Amazon Video top 100.
On Amazon's Facebook page Thursday, many of the comments focused on the time-lapse between upload and publishing- and complaints about the caption and JPG size stipulations.
The multiple download steps required are likely to trip up many amateur YouTube creators.
On Facebook, Donny Stephens wrote: "If you hear this service is going to compete with YouTube, don't believe it. The overly complicated account creation vs. YouTube easy account creation will be the Achilles heel of this service."
But so many others wrote they were thrilled to have another service to pay video creators. Competition always brings out the best. Let’s just hope Amazon can greatly simplify the process for getting our work up there.
Have you checked out Amazon Video Direct yet? What are your thoughts? Let’s chat about it on Twitter, where I’m @jeffersongraham.
