Doing that for 150 people is a pretty long, ugly day, while everybody waited for their turn. You could gather everybody in the same room, and announce it there

Doing that for 150 people is a pretty long, ugly day, while everybody waited for their turn. You could gather everybody in the same room, and announce it there, but that's still not really face-to-face. Delegating it to their direct managers is even worse. They're generally not the ones who made the decision. Even if they were the ones who submitted a list of their people they could live without, it was the higher-ups who approved the layoff en masse. There's just not a great way to give bad news. A video sucks, but it attracts attention only because it's different from the other sucky ways people do it.