Recently I was put to the test by Amazon Direct.  If you too are having trouble getting your videos uploaded to Amazon Direct, here are a few tips that might help you out.

1. Direct Uploads Too Slow – Upload speeds from some Internet Providers like Century Link are much lower than Download speeds.  In some cases, I was getting less than 100 Kb/s for my upload speed.  I suspect this was causing the generic error from Amazon of “Your video could not be uploaded.  Try again later.” – Thanks Amazon, so helpful.
2. Use Amazon S3 – I was able to upload my .MP3 and .MOV files to Amazon S3 via my slow connection.  It did take almost 24 hours to get the files loaded, but finally I could eliminate upload speed as my problem, since in theory moving from S3 to Amazon Direct is all in Amazon’s hands.
3. Get Past the Canonical User Error – In Amazon Direct, the seemingly straightforward directions for connecting an S3 bucket ended up throwing an error for me which read: Invalid principal in policy – “CANONICAL_USER” : …  When I tracked down the error to the Amazon Forum, the final post left me with a solution of “aws s3api put-bucket-acl –bucket mybucket –grant-read id=XXXXX_CANONICAL_USER_ID_XXXXX”.  Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to figure that out, without two days of bashing my head on the wall.  To save anyone else the trouble, I resolved this issue by the following steps:
   1. Login to the Amazon S3 Console online
   2. Navigate to a newly created bucket for Amazon Direct
   3. Navigate to a specifically named folder (from directions in Amazon Direct)
   4. Edit the Permissions for the folder by entering the Canonical ID in the “grantee” field and then checking “list, upload/delete”
   5. Save
   6. Navigate to your video file and edit the permissions for the file by entering the canonical ID as the “grantee” ad checking “open/download”
   7. Save

By following these steps, I was successful in getting my MP3 video published on Amazon Direct. Once I figured it out, I uploaded my artwork to the same bucket.  Remember to set the permissions on each file though, as so Amazon can open/download them.   You can review my video here, on how to photograph soap.

In my searches for help with the errors I received from Amazon, I found several helpful tips in this article from Kids and Money Today, written in May 2016.