Obama makes me want to listen

Both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama use web video to announce their exploratory committees.

Obama is publishing video through Brightcove. This means you can easily email, link to, or embed the video. You also get a channel you can subscribe to using RSS.

Hillary is using her ‘own’ player which means there’s none of this nice stuff.

Another smart touch on the Obama website is the low-bandwidth download for people on dailup and a link to the transcript.

It’s also interesting to compare the production. In the Hillary video the camera is panning from left to right and back all the time. Apart from making you seasick this increases the size of the video file because there’s a lot more information that needs to be encoded.

The Obama video uses a single fixed head-and-shoulders shot. This seems to work very well for these kind of messages on the web; he’s close enough to make it feel like he’s talking to you directly, but not so close that it’s uncomfortable. Hillary is too far away over there on the couch in the first part of the video, and then a little too close and personal when they switch to close-up.

The sound is way better in the Hillary video. Obama sounds thin and ‘canned’, probably because of too much compression.

To me, the Obama video appears to be serious and personal. The Hillary video somehow made me feel I was watching a life insurance commercial. What do you think?