Instagram head Adam Mosseri confirmed on Friday that the social media platform may reduce the quality of videos that do not get many views. This was revealed by the head executive during an Ask-Me-Anything session held on Instagram Stories.
Reduce Video Quality Sessions of Instagram
This session clarified that this ability to reduce quality will apply to all formats, including stories, long videos, and reels. This decision has been made to give priority to videos that are viewed by a lot of users and get a lot of traffic in terms of encoding.
This news has been confirmed through a question and answer between a user and Mosseri & the user posted his question in the threads. The user asked why old stories saved as highlights become low-quality versions of new uploads. In response, Mosseri replied that “the platform has algorithms that automatically check older Stories and Reels that don’t get a lot of views and reduce their quality. This is done to reserve compute resources for videos that many users are watching”.
It further explained that highlights and reels of creators with fewer views will become a bit grainy after a certain period. The quality reduction will be applied once the interest cycle of the video uploaded by the user ends, and it can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks.
However, this feature can also create problems for some smaller creators, and some users have also expressed concern over the move. Responding to other posts in the threads, Mosseri said, “This works on an aggregate level, not on a single viewer level. We are biased towards higher quality (more CPU-intensive encoding and more expansive storage for larger files) for creators who get more views. It’s not a binary threshold but a sliding scale.”
This new move will make it difficult for smaller creators to compete with larger creators. While Mosseri said that based on analytics, users interact with videos based on the quality of the content rather than the video quality, the quality will not drop.
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