Appearing on CNN Does Add 20 Pounds to A-Rod and Tiger

Editor's note: The complete version of this article appears on Jan Ozer's Streaming Learning Center website.

I'm a big fan of CNN, it's a site that I visit frequently. Every time I go, however, I'm surprised that most of their videos are still presented with distorted aspect ratios. I guess it can happen to any producer, though you would have thought that CNN would have it figured out by now. Or, maybe it's just me.

Here's a screengrab from a video about Alex Rodriguez's recent steroids admission on CNN. Note that it was video provided courtesy of ESPN, which is why their logo is embedded. (Note that these screengrabs are smaller than actual size, but the aspect ratio has been maintained.)

Here's pretty much the same frame from the video posted by ESPN.

Looks even more smarmy, doesn't he? But certainly at least 20 pounds lighter. And then there's Tiger, on his recent return to the Accenture tournament. Here he is on CNN, where it looks like he may have added a few pounds during his recent layoff to recuperate from surgery.

Here he is on the PGATour.com (logo on the upper right), svelte as ever.

See the bottom of the full version of this article at Streaming Learning Center for two embedded videos with Tiger footage, one from CNN, the other from ESPN, so you can see what I'm talking about with live videos. In the meantime, what's the lesson? Basically, it's that if you're doing everything correctly on the editing, encoding and player side, video on the web should look just like a digital photo.

Read more, including an analysis of the files using Inlet Semaphore, here.

Jan Ozer (jan at doceo.com) is a streaming media consultant and frequent contributor to industry magazines and websites on streaming related topics and the author of Critical Skills for Streaming Producers, a mixed media tutorial on DVD published by StreamingMedia.com.

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