The popularity of an Instagram video can affect its actual video quality: according to Adam Mosseri (the Meta executive who runs Instagram and Threads), more popular videos are displayed with higher quality, while less popular videos are displayed with inferior quality.
In a video (via The Verge), Mosseri said Instagram tries to show “the highest quality video possible,” but he said, “if something isn’t watched for a long time – because the vast majority of views are in from the start, we will move to a lower quality video.
This is not completely new information; Meta wrote last year about using different encoding configurations for different videos based on their popularity. But after someone shared Mosseri’s video on Threads, many users had questions and criticism, with one going so far as to call the company’s approach “really insane.” .
The discussion prompted Mosseri to offer more details. On the one hand, he clarified that these decisions occur “at an aggregate level, not at an individual level”, so this is not a situation in which the individual viewer’s engagement will affect the quality of the video that is broadcast to him.
“We favor higher quality (more CPU-intensive encoding and more expensive storage for larger files) for creators who generate more views,” Mosseri added. “It is not a binary (threshold), but rather a sliding scale.”
A number of users have also suggested that this approach creates a system that favors popular creators over smaller ones: popular creators can post at the highest quality, which boosts their popularity, while smaller creators cannot not drill.
Mosseri said it was “the right concern”, but he asserted: “In practice it doesn’t seem to matter much, because the change in quality is not huge and (that) people interact or no with videos is much more content based. video quality. Quality, he says, turns out to be “much more important to the original creator.”