Instagram is lowering the quality of videos with fewer views

Some videos posted on Instagram are high quality, while others are low quality, and many people have wondered, 'Why is this video the only one with low quality?' Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram, has explained this question by saying, 'Instagram lowers the quality of videos with fewer views,' which has become a hot topic.

Instagram saves the best video quality for the most popular content - The Verge
https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/27/24280968/instagram-video-quality-lower-for-less-popular-videos

Instagram is lowering video quality for unpopular videos | TechCrunch
https://techcrunch.com/2024/10/27/instagram-is-lowering-video-quality-for-unpopular-videos/

In an Instagram story (a post that is automatically deleted after 24 hours), Mosseri addressed the issue of Instagram video quality in response to a user's question: 'Does the quality of stories deteriorate over time? When I watch my videos in highlights , they're blurry.' The story has since been deleted, but the video has been reposted by a Threads user.

'Generally, we want to show the highest quality video possible,' Mosseri said in the video. 'But if we have a video that hasn't been viewed in a long time, we'll move it to a lower quality video because most of the views are at the beginning of the video. And then if the video starts to get a lot of views again, we'll re-render it at a higher quality.' This means that the quality of the video posted to Instagram may vary depending on how the video performs.

After this response was shared by Threads users, Instagram's approach was questioned and criticized, so Mosseri responded to the post, adding, 'This works at an aggregate level, not an individual viewer level. We bias higher quality (more CPU-intensive encoding and more expensive storage for larger files) towards creators who drive more views. This is not a binary, it's a sliding scale.'

In response to a Threads user's question, 'Won't this make it harder for smaller creators to compete?', Mosseri replied, 'That's a valid concern, but it doesn't seem to matter much in practice, because whether people watch a video is based more on content than on quality, and changes in quality aren't a huge factor. Quality seems to matter a lot more to the original creators, who are more likely to remove their videos due to poor quality, than it does to viewers.'

This is not the first time that Meta has publicly announced that it changes image quality depending on video engagement; Meta has previously described this approach. In a blog post in 2023, the company said, 'Most of the overall viewing time on the Meta app is generated by a relatively small percentage of uploaded videos. Therefore, we need to process videos using different encoding settings depending on their popularity, optimizing compression and computational efficiency at scale,' referring to a system in which image quality improves depending on the viewing time of the video.

MSVP: Meta's first ASIC for video transcoding
https://ai.meta.com/blog/meta-scalable-video-processor-MSVP/