When it comes to Instagram reels or videos, many users and the tech community often see the quality of videos varying, especially when it comes to some of the old ones. While this was a question often asked, it is only recently that the head of the social media platform, Adam Mosseri, shed some light on the difference in video quality and where it stems from. It looks like if your video has not brought a lot of views, your quality might be brought down.
Adam Mosseri confirms that Instagram does, in fact, reduce the video quality for some of the posts and that users are not delusional
Have you ever scrolled through Instagram and noticed that some of the videos' quality was not up to the mark, passing it off as maybe a fault on the content creator's end? While talking to AMA, Instagram head Adam Mosseri gave more details on this discrepancy of quality and admitted that Instagram does adjust the quality of videos according to their performance.
In response to one of the questions asked about blurred highlights, especially older stories, Mosseri clarified that while they labor for the highest quality videos as most views are gained during the initial time they are posted, videos are later moved to a lower quality. If, for instance, the video gains popularity again, then Instagram shifts it back to higher quality videos, as highlighted by Engadget.
Mosseri, when explaining this in detail, mentioned the bias toward videos that generate more views:
We bias to higher quality (more CPU-intensive encoding and more expensive storage for bigger files) for creators who drive more views.
This comment, however, did not sit well with micro-content creators or small creators who believe it puts them on the downside, especially against those with larger platforms. Meta has noted that as part of its resource management strategy, it uses different encoding configurations for processing videos based on their popularity. This approach aims to optimize computing resources by adjusting the quality based on viewership levels, which helps maintain the platform's efficient performance.
In response to the small content creators dismay over being at a disadvantage, Mosseri further explained:
Quality seems to be much more important to the original creator, who is more likely to delete the video if it looks poor, than to their viewers.
So, for viewers, this change does not affect them much because the focus is on the content rather than the quality, but some of the creators were still left feeling in a detrimental position. Irrespective of whether this tweak Instagram does for its videos changes how viewers view the content or not, it is still a revelation that the best quality is assigned to videos that drive more views.
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