Amazon Sponsored Brands video: 1 Mbps and 96 kbps audio minimums

Amazon's Sponsored Brands video spec sets a floor of 1 Mbps for video (4 Mbps or more recommended) and 96 kbps audio at 44.1 kHz, in 16:9 only. Those are encode settings, so you verify them on the exported file, not in the prompt. The numbers come from Amazon's Sponsored Brands video specs, read 2026-10-03.

The full spec on one page

Bitrate and audio are the least visible items on the spec, which is why clips fail on them. The rest is dimensions and length.

What Sume controls and what it does not

Sume's timeline and trim endpoints do not take codec or bitrate fields. The timeline docs state that the server compiles ffmpeg and that keys such as filtergraph, ffmpeg_args, codec and crf are rejected with a 400. So you cannot dial a bitrate through Sume. You can choose output size and frame rate, and then you must measure the result.

Frame rate is controllable: output.fps accepts 24, 25, 30 or 60, so pick 24, 25 or 30 for this placement. Size is controllable through output.width and output.height (even integers from 256 to 2160), but the table shows 3840x2160 as an accepted Amazon size, and a timeline render is capped at 2160 per side, so a 4K timeline render is not available. Use 1920x1080.

Check the exported file

Run ffprobe on the downloaded MP4 before you upload. It reports video bitrate, audio bitrate and sample rate. If the clip is a short generated shot, it can come in near the 1 Mbps floor, and the audio track may be missing or at a different rate, so confirm the audio stream exists.

A small script makes this repeatable for a batch:

ffprobe -v error -select_streams v:0 -show_entries stream=codec_name,width,height,r_frame_rate,bit_rate -of default=nw=1 clip.mp4
ffprobe -v error -select_streams a:0 -show_entries stream=codec_name,sample_rate,bit_rate -of default=nw=1 clip.mp4

If the bitrate is under 1 Mbps

Re-encode locally with your own encoder at 4 Mbps or more for H.264, then re-run the probe. Do the re-encode as the last step, after trims and assembly, so you only do it once. Keep the Sume job id in your batch log so a failed upload can be traced back to the render that produced it.