Instagram saves the best video quality for the most popular content

Have you ever wondered why some of your Instagram videos tend to look blurry while others are clear and sharp? Because on Instagram, the quality of your video apparently depends on how many views it receives. That's according to an AMA video from Instagram boss Adam Mosseri, in which he explained why some videos are lower quality than others.

Here's part of Mosseri's explanation from the video reposted today by a Threads user:

In general, we want to show the highest quality videos we can… But if something goes unwatched for a long time – because the vast majority of views are at the beginning – we switch to a lower quality video. And then when it gets viewed again a lot, we re-render the video at a higher quality.

He continues, adding that the platform does this to “show people the highest quality content we can.”

Instagram is dedicating more resources to videos from “creators who generate more views,” Mosseri later wrote in response to the Threads post that included the clip.

The quality shift “isn't big,” Mosseri said in response to another Threads user who asked whether this approach puts smaller developers at a disadvantage. That was “the right thing to do,” he told them, but said people interact with videos based on their content, not their quality.

This is consistent with the way Meta previously described its approach. In 2021, the company predicted that it would not be able to keep up with the increasing number of videos uploaded to the platform. (Meta estimated last year that Facebook served 4 billion video streams per day.)

Meta wrote in a blog that new uploads are given the fastest and simplest encoding to conserve computing resources for the relatively few, most viewed videos. After a video “reaches a sufficiently high watch time,” it receives a more robust encoding pass. Once it's popular enough, Meta applies its most advanced (read: slowest, most computationally intensive) processing to the video. The result, of course, is that the most popular YouTubers tend to have the best-looking videos.