If you are fond of uploading videos on instagramyou may have noticed that your videos look less sharp and blurrier than others that the platform serves you in your feed. It’s a phenomenon regardless of the quality of your camera or the resolution at which the video was recorded and that has to do with another factor that has revealed Adam Mosseridirector of Instagram, this weekend.
The reason you have Goal so that some videos are shown with worse quality than others is saving resources. For example, only in Facebook the company serves every day 4 billion videoswhich requires enormous computing effort.
‘In general, we want to show the highest quality videos… but If something is not seen for a significant amount of time – because the vast majority of views happen at the beginning – we will reduce the quality of the video. And if it is seen a lot again, we will render it again at a higher quality,’ explained Mosseri.
The video with the statements of the head of Instagram has been published on Threads. Mosseri later participated in the thread expanding his explanations.
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‘It works at an aggregate level, not at the individual viewer level. We lean towards higher quality (more CPU-intensive encoding and more expensive storage for larger files) for creators who generate more views. This is not a binary threshold, but a sliding scale,’ he added. The goal of this resource prioritization is to ‘show people the highest quality content we can.’
The change in quality ‘it’s not huge’Mosseri responded to another Threads user who asked if that approach hurt smaller creators. That is ‘the right concern,’ but he noted that People interact with videos based on their content, not their quality.
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Meta had previously alluded to this approach. In 2021, the company commented that it would not be able to keep up with the growing number of videos uploaded to the platform.
In May 2023, Meta explained on its blog that, in order to conserve computing resources for the relatively few most viewed videos, gives new videos the fastest and most basic encoding. After a video ‘gets a high enough watch time’, receives a new higher quality encoding. Once it becomes popular enough, Meta applies its most advanced processing to video. That is, the slowest and most expensive in computing resources. The result is that the most popular creators tend to have the most visually appealing videos.