Have you ever wondered why some of your instagram videos tend to look blurry, while others are crisp and clear? It's because, on instagram, the quality of your video apparently depends on how many views it gets. That's according to an AMA video from instagram head Adam Mosseri, in which he explains why some videos are lower quality than others.
Here is part of Mosseri's explanation, from the video, which was republished by a Threads user today:
In general, we want to show the highest quality video possible… But if something is not viewed for a long time (because the vast majority of views are at the beginning), we will move to a lower quality video. And then, if it is viewed frequently again, we will play the video again in higher quality.
He goes on to add that the platform does this to “show people the highest quality content possible.”
instagram dedicates more resources to videos from “creators who generate the most views,” Mosseri wrote later in response to the Threads post containing the clip.
The change in quality “is not huge” You have Mosser. in response to another Threads user, who asked if that approach hurt smaller creators. That's “the right concern,” he told them, but he said people engage with videos based on their content, not their quality.
This is consistent with how Meta described his approach above. In 2021, the company instagram-video-processing-encoding-reduction/”>projected would not be able to keep up with the increasing number of videos uploaded to the platform. (Goal ai.meta.com/blog/meta-scalable-video-processor-MSVP/#at_scale”>My dear last year it served 4 billion video streams per day on facebook).
Goal ai.meta.com/blog/meta-scalable-video-processor-MSVP/#efficiency”>wrote in a blog which to conserve computing resources for the relatively few most viewed videos, provides new uploads with the fastest and most basic encoding. After a video “gets a high enough watch time,” it receives a stronger encoding pass. Once it becomes popular enough, Meta applies its most advanced (read: slowest and most computationally expensive) processing to the video. The result, of course, is that the most popular creators tend to have the most engaging videos.
