Key Takeaways
- Instagram prioritizes high-quality playback for videos with higher views and engagement.
- Videos viewed through increase quality, demonstrating sharper visuals than those with low views.
- Meta employs a transcoding process to ensure high-quality video playback as view count rises.
One of the age-old questions regarding Instagram is how some videos can end up looking low quality with poor bitrate. Well, it turns out that Instagram prioritizes high-quality playback for videos that are garnering views.
In a recent AMA, Instagram head Adam Mosseri peeled back the curtain and revealed why some videos end up looking sharper than others. It all boils down to whether a video is getting viewed and maintaining engagement from users.
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Adam Mosseri answers a burning question about Instagram
Mosseri believes the image quality discrepancy is minimal
“In general, we want to show the highest-quality video we can,” Mosseri explains. “But if something isn’t watched for a long time — because the vast majority of views are in the beginning — we will move to a lower-quality video. And then if it’s watched again a lot then we’ll re-render the higher quality video.”
If you upload a video, Instagram identifies whether the piece of content is being viewed all the way through. For videos and creators “who drive more views,” that video will be shown in much higher quality. The fidelity is much higher with sharper, more appealing visuals. Instagram does this in order to continue to “show people the highest-quality content we can.”
However, this comes at a cost for videos that aren’t performing well or for creators who don’t have high engagement. To conserve computing resources, some videos are rendered in lower quality with pixelation and blurry images. The varying degree in quality “isn’t huge,” Mosseri says.
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Meta uses an in-house-developed ASIC solution
The amount of videos Meta oversees is reaching unprecedented thresholds. For instance, the company estimates that in 2023, four billion video streams were offered each day on Facebook.
Last year, Meta detailed its latest video transcoding process. The Meta Scalable Video Processor (MSVP) process is the first in-house-developed ASIC solution for the company. Each uploaded video gets the fastest most basic encoding. However, once a video reaches an undisclosed amount of views, the technology runs it through another encoding pass, ensuring it looks the best.
The varying degrees to which these videos look on Instagram likely won’t affect regular users who post videos on their travels or a weekend BBQ. However, this does answer the question of how high-profile content creators always have the best-looking videos consistently.
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