- Instagram's Adam Mosseri revealed that the platform lowers video quality based on content popularity.
- The app favors creators with higher popular and adjusts quality of videos posted by less popular creators.
- Mosseri says this is done to save on CPU and storage resources.
Instagram and its popular Reels format cater to a huge audience globally. However, if you spend more time on Instagram than average, you may have sometimes noticed that the quality of the videos isn’t the same across the platform. Some are sharp, while others may appear blurry. It turns out that Instagram intentionally adjusts the quality of videos based on content popularity.
Instagram’s Head, Adam Mosseri, confirmed this in a recent AMA session. He said that Instagram lowers the quality of the video after a long time if it isn’t being watched. He also mentioned that the platform restores the quality if the content gains more popularity.
Post by @mosseriView on Threads
Mosseri replied to the thread to expand on what he had said. He said that the quality reduction “works at an aggregate level”. He then adds, “We bias to higher quality for creators who drive more views. It’s not a binary threshold, but rather a sliding scale”.
In layman’s terms, Instagram adjusts the quality of videos to reduce the load on its servers, to save energy. Low-quality files don’t take up much storage, it saves the firm a lot of storage space. Again, Mosseri didn’t highlight if it’s the resolution that’s affected or the bit rate, but we’d like to believe the latter to be the case since he specifically said CPU-intensive encoding.
Post by @mosseriView on Threads
When questioned whether this will make it harder for smaller creators to compete, Mosseri stated the importance of content over quality. He says that user engagement relies more on the content of the video, rather than its quality. Mosseri then proceeds to say that quality would matter to a popular creator, who’s likely to delete the video if it looks poor. He adds, that would not be the case with a less popular creator.
What are your thoughts on Instagram reducing the quality of Reels? Let us know in the comments.
