Instagram confirms some videos are streamed in lower quality

Estimated reading time: 3 minutes

Many influencers have long stumbled on this, and Instagram has finally disclosed it. The video sharing service decreases the quality of your upload unless the video becomes viral.

Now, a large number of people have posted stories and Reels – however, there was a less obvious fact noticed, namely that their quality could vary. You joining the club if some of the videos previously uploaded that seemed just okay after the post now appear blurred in the Instagram Highlights section. Interestingly, it fact this does happen and rather than completely replacing the current video or making changes to it, Instagram streams videos that are not viewed enough at a lower bitrate.

Recently, the head of Instagram, Adam Mosseri, said in a Threads Q&A that video quality is intentionally limited depending on whether the content is popular. ” if someone is not viewing most of your video, Instagram will downgrade its quality,” he said. I realised the feature was developed to operate at an aggregate level and not at the level of the individual viewer, Mosseri said.

Indeed, flipping the switch on Instagram’s hidden high-quality video mode won’t do the trick because streaming quality is decided dynamically. Other many platforms also cut-off the quality of videos to ensure that they do not take up too much of the space and data. “We favor higher quality (higher CPU usage for encoding and more costly storage for larger files) for creators who generate more views,” Mosseri continued.

Some creators also remember that the proposed logic harms channels with less subscribers: they will not have high involvement since no one wants to watch blurry videos on their smartphone. Therefore, the situation must be even worse for the smaller channels to build their audience and contend with more significant channels.

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Sadly, there is not much here you can do, aside from going back to YouTube of course, if you wish to have a high quality version which everyone can download easily. Your only choice on Instagram is to continue posting your videos to Instagram in recommended sizes and dimensions, crossing fingers for the algorithm to maintain your videos’ quality. This is most rife when it comes to Instagram highlights; I have saved my Instagram Highlights because I want the profile visitors to check some of my older uploads, but I do not want them watching blurry Reels and low quality videos.

This is true in many other sites too. Usually, most of the social media sites automatically migrate old videos to a cheaper database storage on purpose. I do not often go on instagram, but I really liked facebook before it got really popular. I synced numerous photos to Facebook as my photo backup archive as well. But year after year all my previous Facebook pictures turned low-quality because Meta had to cut costs on data storage.