For many of the teams, english is a second or third language, and they came from areas where startups/tech are in it's infancy, so access to decent hardware is tough.

With that said, we only spent a week working on videos and it's more our fault than theirs that we chose to focus on building product rather than pitching, as many companies were very early.

I think a couple text lines about the market, some screenshots, and a product demo video would be good. Optionally, for those looking for funding, some info on traction growth.

The hardest is the demo video, but that is the most important. Without a good demo video you don't understand why your product exists.

If they have a laptop with a microphone, they still have the ability to make a much, much more impressive presentation than nearly any of the ones I watched.

Why spend hundreds of hours building your product if you spent 10 minutes writing a script you're going to read out to your webcam in a dimly lit room?

Probably because they are busy growing their businesses in other ways.

As far as I can tell, the distribution of the pitch videos is unknown (and there are hundreds of pitches) so there is no end goal, it seems to be mainly a way of sharpening one's pitch.

Yeah a lot of these pitches were very wooden, and many seemed to try to catch your attention by quoting the multi billion dollar markets the founders wish to grab a piece of the pie from. Shark Tank pitches are way better.

Not too surprising given the low barrier to entry and acceptance rate. Doesn't mean there aren't some gems. In fact that's the whole point of this program, to give more people chances to do something great. Maybe not everybody makes full use of that chance, but it gives the opportunity to do so to more people

I checked presentations on AR and every video was either low quality or I didn't even understand what it was about.

Keep in mind, these videos are nice, but unlike demo day, they are unlikely to result in funding. For companies that are working on getting stuff out the door, the video is probably not the highest priority.