Some users have noticed that some of their Instagram videos look blurry, while others look sharp. As it turned out, it doesn’t always depend on the quality of the source material. The fact is that on Instagram, video quality depends on the number of views. This was stated by Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri.
«In general, we want to show the highest quality video we can… But if something is not watched for a long time — because the vast majority of views are at the beginning — we switch to a lower quality video. And then, if it gets a lot of views again, we’ll play the higher quality video again,” Mosseri explains.
That’s why older videos are more likely to have poorer playback quality. New account holders can face the same problem. Since they do not yet have a large audience of subscribers, their videos are not watched much, and therefore the platform plays them in poorer quality.
At the same time, Adam Mosseri adds that the platform is doing this to «show people the highest quality content». Instagram is devoting more resources to videos from «creators that attract more views»,” he wrote.
The head of Instagram assures that the changes in quality are small», and this approach does not disadvantage creators with a small audience, as people interact with videos based on their content, not their quality.
These comments are consistent with previous statements from Meta. The company has said that to save computing resources for the relatively few videos that are most viewed, it gives fresh uploads the fastest and easiest encoding. After a «video gets a long enough watch time of», it gets better encoding. When it becomes popular enough, Meta applies its most advanced (read: most computationally expensive) processing to the video. As a result, of course, the most popular creators tend to have the best videos. And newcomers and not-so-popular creators have to put up with poorer video quality.
Source: The Verge