Instagram Reduces Quality for Videos That Don’t Get Views

Ever noticed that some of your Instagram videos look clear while others appear blurry? The quality of your video on Instagram actually depends on how popular it is.

Adam Mosseri, the head of the Company, explained in an Instagram AMA (Ask Me Anything) why some videos seem to have better quality than others.

According to Mosseri, Instagram initially shows videos of the highest quality possible. If users do not watch a video much, the platform will reduce its quality because most views occur early on. But if the video later gets more attention, Instagram will reprocess it in higher quality. This approach aims to ensure excess computing power is only used on videos that are doing better.

While this might seem unfair to smaller creators, he assured users that video quality has only a minor impact and that engagement mainly comes from the content itself, not the quality.

This strategy reflects how Meta, Instagram’s parent company, manages video content across platforms. In 2021, Meta acknowledged the difficulty of keeping up with the growing volume of video uploads. To handle this, Meta starts by encoding videos quickly and with minimal resources. Only when a video gains substantial watch time does it receive higher-quality processing. As a result, the most popular videos ultimately look the best due to additional processing stages.

This approach is similar to that of YouTube, where videos with fewer views tend to load slower, and often look worse than more popular videos, indicating that the extra bandwidth is directed where most of YouTube’s traffic is going.