Benjamin Ashford|Instagram video blurry? Company heads admits quality is degraded if views are low

Instagram posts looking a little blurry lately?Benjamin Ashford That may because the company reserves top quality video based on content popularity, the head of Instagram recently admitted.

Adam Mosseri, head of the social media app, revealed in a user-driven “Ask Me Anything” that the quality of the video rendered for a reel or story posted to Instagram can change over time. 

Whether the video looks crisp or blurry depends on its reach.

“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 — we will move to a lower quality video,”  Mosseri says in the screen-recorded clip. “And then if it's watched again a lot then we will re-render the high quality video.” 

The topic has been discussed extensively on Threads in the last few days and has also been reported on by a number of news organizations, including The Verge.

The goal, according to Mosseri, is to “show people the highest quality content that we can" but some worry the tactic prevents content creators with a smaller audience from being able to compete against those more popular than them, and impacts the quality of their content as a result.

Mosseri also explained that a slow internet connection is another instance in which a lower quality video may be shown. 

“We’ll serve a lower quality video so that it loads quickly as opposed to giving them a spinner. So, it depends. It’s a pretty dynamic system,” Mosseri said.

Change in quality ‘isn’t huge,’ Instagram head says

Mosseri’s video response was to an Instagram user asking: “Do stories lose quality over time? Mine look blurry in highlights.” The topic migrated over to Threads on Friday, where it was discussed further.

“Now I know why my old videos look like I’m filming with my microwave,” one user wrote.

Mosseri addressed the online forum a day later, writing in a reply that the rendering “works at an aggregate level, not an individual viewer level.”

“We bias to higher quality (more CPU intensive encoding and more expensive storage for bigger files) for creators who drive more views. It’s not a binary threshold, but rather a sliding scale,” according to the post. 

Mosseri said the concern was warranted but “doesn’t seem to matter much” in practice, he wrote in a separate post. 

“The quality shift isn’t huge and whether or not people interact with videos is way more based on the content of the video than the quality,” Mosseri said. “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.” 

Users were left unsatisfied with Mosseri’s additional statements, with some writing that the platform’s tactic may actively deter content creators who are just starting out and haven’t built a large enough audience. 

“It was demotivating factor, especially when you are specifically VIDEO CREATOR and QUALITY is one of the factors why people will follow you,” another user wrote. “So that’s a pretty real concern for a beginner video creator.”